


Legacy of the Force

by RKibbles



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Badass Rey, Ben Solo in the World Between Worlds, F/M, Fix-It, Happy Ending, Jedi Finn (Star Wars), Multi, POV Rose Tico, Post-Canon, Redeemed Armitage Hux, Redeemed Ben Solo, Stormtrooper Rebellion, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:41:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 27,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22335703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RKibbles/pseuds/RKibbles
Summary: Despite the defeat of Palpatine's Final Order, the war between the Resistance and the returned Empire is not over. With both Ben Solo and Rey missing, the war has moved out of the realm of the mystical and personal. Poe and Finn work together to bring an end to First Order (now Imperial Remnant), hoping to find a more peaceful resolution to moving forward. Meanwhile still reeling from the events of Episode IX, Rey searches for the other half of her dyad and Ben Solo simply looks for his path forward.
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Finn, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 8
Kudos: 20





	1. Title Scroll

Episode X  
Legacy of the Force

  
_War rages on. Despite the defeat of EMPEROR PALPATINE and his FINAL ORDER the battle between RESISTANCE and IMPERIAL REMNANTS continues. Both sides work to bring about the end of the other, and war rages across the galaxy. After the uprising brought upon by the fight against the Final Order the Resistance now edges closer to a full Galactic Alliance._

  
_POE DAMERON, leader of the Resistance, searches for a means to end the violence, and restore peace to the Galaxy. Joining him in his quest, FINN has begun training in the ways of the Jedi working on the MILLENIUM FALCON to study the texts left behind to train the next generation, the two heroes finding their way to Serreno, an industrial planet that has offered aid in the form of a reconstructed fleet. Joining them is ROSE TICO, now a chief diplomat for the new Alliance._

  
_Meanwhile the last JEDI KNIGHT, REY, has gone missing. Last confirmed seen on the desert planet TATOOINE under the pseudonym SKYWALKER, she has been subject of much rumor, with many claiming she is searching for BEN SOLO, the last son of the family begat by fallen Jedi ANAKIN SKYWALKER..._

_#_


	2. World Between Worlds

# Ben 1

  
“Ben.” He heard it one, then again but an echo this time. He opened his eyes. The space he was in was strange. Foreign to him, but familiar at the same time. It was like… he tried not to think of it, but it reminded him of his first moment with Palpatine. This place, wherever it was, was strong in the force.

  
Then he heard another voice, his own, “Don’t be afraid, I feel it too.” He stood quickly, worried at what he would see. But there was nothing. The space began to fill in as his eyes found edges and landscape that had not seemed to previously exist. The land here was dull. Blasted rock that curved before him and had a gravity to it, enough anyway that a step forward would not send him careening off into… he looked up and at first saw more nothingness.

  
Then, like with the rock landscape he saw more. Electricity crackled in the sky, and briefly he saw Kylo Ren, the monster who he had once been, stalking through woods that were green, verdant with life. His hands tensed reaching for his lightsaber, but instead he grasped at nothing.

  
“Courageous you are, but patience still you must learn,” a voice called. It had more substance, in the only way that he could feel, he felt that it was more real. Speaking to him rather than just an echo.  
“Who are you?” Ben Solo asked, “Another trick? A memory?” He did not say it, but his mind went so far as to wonder if this was Palpatine, separating him and Rey again. Trying to divide them.  
“A memory, hm? Listen to memories, you do not anymore?” the voice asked insistently.

  
“Dear child. I see your eyes. You already know the truth. Whomever you're waiting for on Jakku... they're never coming back... But... there's someone who still could.” He looked at the source of that echo, and saw a stout being holding forth the lightsaber of his grandfather.

  
He began to walk along this landscape, there was but a single trail that sloped forward and down, and behind him it went off and twisted at an odd angle. He could see it now in the distance both directions, splitting and twisting, continuing in every which way. It reminded him of a web, with different paths crossing over one another. “Okay then, whoever you are, what am I supposed to be doing? Is this a trick?” He was growing frustrated with what was here, or rather the lack of what was here. For nearly his whole life he had spent time on dead or dying planets, none as desolate as this, but he had rejected that darkness. Or at least he had tried to. Was this all there was to be? Perhaps he was dead.

  
“A trick,” the voice agreed, “Of the Force, not of any one being.” So be it, he thought, and continued walking. If this was a trick of the Force, he ought lean into it, not away. It had helped him return Rey to life, and if that was the will of the Force than their goals were in some way aligned.

  
As he continued down this path, he found it reminded him more of vines then webs. It called to mind the images of the jungles he had once visited with Luke while they were training. He tried to think of the last time he’d been on a planet that had made him feel alive and part of nature rather than alone, or even dead. Takodana, he thought. Where he had met Rey.

  
Down the vine he went. “What should I call you?” Ben asked.

  
“Yoda,” the voice said, “A master of the Jedi I once was, a pupil I now am.” Ben saw him now. Or saw a vision of some sort. He looked like a goblin from one of Han Solo’s stories growing up. The ones that Ben remembered as though they’d been from another life. Old, wrinkled, and green, the being in front of him could be not even a meter in height even standing, and sitting as he was he would barely have reached Ben’s knee. His dirt brown undertunic seemed reflective of Ben’s own black one . Yoda, the name was familiar to him.

  
“You were Luke’s Master,” he said quietly. The goblin-like being smiled and chuckled quietly.

  
“Luke’s Master, indeed I was. A better Jedi than me, he was. Brought Anakin back to the Light, when I could not,” the old Jedi Master explained, “Better Luke was, than myself and Obi-Wan. Better Rey will be, than Luke was. One day…”

  
“One day, Rey will have an apprentice better than herself,” Ben said. It struck him now, that she was out there. Still alive. Did she even know where he was? That he hadn’t passed fully into the Force.  
Yoda floated down from where his spirit was hovering until he was beside Ben on the path of darkness. A walking stick manifested in his hand, and his steps were much shorter than Ben’s, forcing the younger man to slow his pace so that they could walk together. “Return to the light, you intend to,” Yoda said now, almost a question.

  
“I tried,” Ben said quietly, “I… did all that I could to help Rey put an end to Palpatine. Darth Sidious. I tried to save her. It was, it was only fair, after what she did for me. She never stopped believing, did she? Believing in me, believing in the legend of Luke, believing that there was more good out there than bad.” The question wasn’t for Yoda, but the old Jedi nodded knowingly. It was enough confirmation for Ben. Ahead the path began to split out, what looked like large trees loomed overhead. At their bases the trees split, and although they were still a ways off, Ben could already see light peering through the bases. They led somewhere else. The question was where.

  
“What you did,” Yoda said, “Others cannot do. Tried, many have, but their power… alone they tried. Together, you were, and only together did the Force do that most great act.”

  
“The way that I healed her?” Ben asked. Once more Yoda nodded in that knowing way. “Because we… we were a dyad in the Force.”

  
“Around the Skywalkers, the Force has found favorites,” Yoda said with a small smile, “It is not for me to say. Your next Master, more will they have to say on the subject.” They were nearer one of the trees now and Ben peered into the light that he had seen from so far off. It was a vision wholly surprising to him, though not completely unfamiliar. He could see the mud, and water surrounding it. He was viewing another world, not unlike when he’d been able to see through space to where Rey had been. Back when she traveled to Ach-To, and then later, when he’d found a way to break through the barrier that Rey had put between them. Except the other side of this vision was not her but instead a familiar sight.

  
“My blade,” he said quietly. Sitting at what must have been the bottom of the ocean of Endor was his crossguard saber. It was still where he’d left it. “Why?” he asked solemnly.

  
“Rely on the past, you can no longer,” Yoda told him, “Seek a new path forward, you must. This saber, belongs to you it does.”

  
“It’s a tool of the Dark Side,” Ben said, looking at him, “It belonged to Kylo Ren.”

  
The older Jedi made a humming sound, like he was contemplating what Ben had said. “And him, you are not?”

  
“I…” Ben hesitated, staring at the saber. His next words were resolute. “I am Ben Solo. I gave up the darkness so that I could be the person that Rey needed me to be.”

  
“Needed you to be?” the gremlin said, “Hide your darkness, Rey asked? Or be whole she asked? Kylo Ren, a shadow he was. Ben Solo, walker of the world between worlds, is no better. No being is light itself. Darkness… deny it the Jedi Order did. Fall, the Jedi did. Take your blade again.” The blade… the saber that he’d held for so long and used in his darkest moments. This was the blade that had killed his father. The blade that built at Snoke’s instruction. Based on old Jedi designs, ones he’d found from even before the High Republic era when Luke and Lor San Tekka had brought him along on their journeys.

  
“Must I?” Ben asked, shying away from looking directly at the blade, though his body was set in frame to it, he instead looked solely at the old Jedi Master.

  
Yoda shrugged, which was not what Ben had expected. “Up to me, it is not. The choice is yours. The Force, another choice it may recommend, but the blade it has presented to you. Only offer my knowledge, I can.”

  
Ben reached out his arm and called through the Force to the hilt of the blade. It shook where it was, but did not move from it’s place. “Powerful, you are,” Yoda said, “But the portal moves through both time and distance. You are between worlds, and to act on the world without… impressive.”

  
Ben nodded silently. Reach through the portal, that was the only way. Grab the hilt there, or call it to him. He stepped forward to the gateway. It was bright, and it was only through it’s brightness that he realized how dark the place they were was. He extended his hand, and touched the barrier. It was like a membrane, a veil more than it was like the barrier he expected. The closest comparison he had was to the shields on a ship that kept the vacuum of space away, but he was unsure which side this was more alike. He reached through tentatively, and found it molding around his hand making him wish that he still had his gloves which he’d thrown away in the haste to get to Exogol and shed himself of everything that was “Kylo Ren” at the same time.

  
Suddenly he broke through the membrane, and his hand as well as the end of his sleeve suddenly began to soak. However, in the same way, he felt something else. Like a tugging at the back of his mind. It was… similar to the bond he’d felt with Rey through the Force previously, but it was different in ways he could not determine from his own understanding of the Force and the bond that existed through it. It flared up as he reached through, which was enough of a shock for him to realize that it had never really gone. In effect, he had never truly known it’s absence. He wondered if Rey, wherever she was, however she was, could feel it. It was like a veil of it’s own. He wanted desperately to push through it, but something stopped him. Instead, his fingers reached forward, his forearm getting drenched in the process, and pulled the blade from water. When he did, his arm came back through and the connection under the tree severed.

  
The bond that linked him and Rey suddenly went slack, like a string where one end was cut, but it had not altogether vanished. He wondered if she could recognize the feeling of it going taut. “Now what?” he asked, turning back to where Yoda was. Except the Jedi Master was gone. The weight of being alone fell on him again, not dissimilar to how he’d felt before he had met the scavenger from Jakku. But even at that time he had been hearing the voice, the pressure of Snoke. Palpatine, he corrected himself. Now, luckily, that was gone. Had been gone, in fact since he had found Rey dead at the Sith Throne on Exogol. Although he was resolute in giving up the dark side, a part of him wanted to lash out now. The Force was just as harsh a master as his previous ones. He was alone again. He turned back to the gateway, barely cognizant that he’d pulled anything through, and pushed against the membrane that was now dark on the other side. Nothing. He was once more stuck here.

  
He didn’t know when he’d fallen on his knees, but suddenly he came back to himself. He had to continue on, if only to figure out what was next. He ignited the blade switch, and the power thrummed through it, venting out the sides of the hilt. It was still red, though he didn’t know what else he could have expected there. He may have changed, but his blade was still the same. It felt heavier in his hand than it ever had previously. Looking back to the main path, he saw there were still other paths open, other portals. He would just have to find one then that would bring him to civilization. Then he thought of what Yoda had told him, that the portals moved through time and space. Perhaps there was more than just finding the right where to arrive.

  
He stepped back onto the path, and realized that the bond between him and Rey wasn’t fully slack. When he thought on it, focused on the feeling he expected to feel through it, there was vibration, like a string on a hallikset. She was out there. Doubt plagued him, whether this was right. It would be easier for the galaxy if Ben Solo were gone. Or disappeared into some distant past. Perhaps he could change things so he never came to be. It was an alternative he considered. “Problems for later,” he said aloud, and stepped forward. Holding the blade aloft, light guided the way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1.21.2020] Based on Rebels it seems the WBW can appear differently to those inside, so I took some liberties with it in description. This chapter was mostly setting up Ben's quest forward. Also, apologies if Yoda's dialogue seems stilted, its a WIP. Next: Rey


	3. Return to the Cave

# Rey 1

  
Streaks of light shifted into pinpoints of light on the other side of the cockpit as she came out of hyperspace above Ahch-To. Her helmet shifted on her head, even with the padding she’d added to it. However, she refused to return to Jakku just to pick up an old helmet. She wasn’t ready to find the Millennium Falcon yet. She’d managed to duck away from the Resistance right after the battle with the Final Order, to bury the sabers where they would hopefully go undisturbed. Certainly there were other blades out there, but if a future force wielder could be prevented from stumbling across Anakin’s blue lightsaber, it could prevent any potential re-living of his experiences. Although she did not have the ability to such an extreme degree, she’d discovered in the texts that some Jedi had Psychometry, the ability to read or experience an objects past - the text had been vague.

  
Whatever she had, it wasn’t that, even if it was similar. Perhaps… she had often wondered, did she have an opposite ability? The ability to see potential futures of an object. But it wasn’t everything. So perhaps the Force had just needed a tool, and she fit the job. BB-8 made a noise through the system of the starfighter. “No, I’m not doubting myself again,” she said, “I’m done with that.” It wasn’t wholly true, but the droid would be upset if she said otherwise.

  
“I just… I still don’t understand why my ability in the Force seems to be so unlike the Jedi that came before me. If I’m to be the Jedi Master going forward I need to know what I’m capable of. How else can I teach?” she explained. Wherever he was, Finn was certainly waiting for her to come back and teach him everything she knew. Even after the year she’d spent studying it was considerably less than she was happy with. Granted, it had hardly been a full year of studying, what with her time being torn between the different excursions that she’d been on, on behalf of the Resistance. Between the time they’d spent on Ryloth and her journey to Mon Cala, let alone some of the different adventures she’d been on with Finn, Poe, and Rose to deal with First Order assaults. Though even then, the heaviest attacks had always been through mercenary gangs that had been hired by the First Order, with most of the stormtroopers maintaining “order” on the populated planets. Back then she wished she’d known what Supreme Leader Kylo Ren had been thinking. Now she wished she’d had the time to ask Ben why he’d done that?

  
She had not returned to the Resistance yet, nor did she know when or if she ever would. What would she say, the lost son of Leia had been discovered and recovered by herself? Did others even know that Ben was the same person as Kylo Ren. She shuddered at the thought. They were hardly the same. Kylo Ren had been a mask, a way he had tortured himself when all he could feel was the cold touch of Palpatine in his head. A pain he’d felt because the Sith Lord had failed to find her. But once again, even the story she’d learned of Palpatine and her parents… it made little sense in her head. She almost wondered how much of it was real because it so much felt like changes and modifications to her memories rather than absolute truths about them. Could Palpatine have been in her head, tampering with her thoughts and feelings the way he’d been with Ben? She had so many questions still, and so few resources with which to explore them. By the time she’d gone looking for Maz Kanata, hoping the little woman would have answers, the humanoid had already left the Resistance behind her. In the time it took for Rey to return from Tatooine, the Resistance had already mostly moved onto another base, another setup from which to take pot-shots at the First Order. When she’d asked Finn, he’d told her to ask Poe, and when she’d made herself go to ask Poe he had simply shrugged, “Maz goes where she wants and where she’s needed.”

  
Her response, “Well I need her now” hadn’t elicited any sort of response. What Poe probably hadn’t expected was for Rey to get back in the X-Wing she’d found on Ahch-To and leave for greener pastures. A part of her felt poorly about abandoning the Resistance and stealing BB-8 from Poe to boot, but the droid had chosen to come with her, and the Resistance was far from home for her. Her family had been Leia and Han and Ben. All of them were gone now, and with Finn attached at Poe’s hip she had felt it best not to mention to either of them where she was going, or why she was trying to leave.  
She changed before leaving, a simple sleeveless black tunic and pants, belted over the tunic with a large band of black, and she threw a white shawl on over the tunic which sat in bunches over her collarbone. Her scar also, was left showing, and when she turned about her arm to see it, she found that one half of the scar looked different. It had faded, still visibly present, but less immediately noticeable than the other half. With the new outfit on, she put up her head and went to the X-Wing.

  
It had been Lt. Connix who had caught her of all people. The other woman had been working on one of the many ships that had come in after the fight with the Final Order. “That should be all fixed up,” the soldier said, hopping down from where she’d been soldering something on one of the other fighters, “Are you taking it on for a mission. It’ll fly… but I think it’s fighting days are done.”  
“Wish I could say the same,” Rey said wistfully, “But no, no mission. I’ve got personal business I’ve got to handle.”

  
“Does Poe know?” Connix asked.

  
“I’m sure he will once you tell him,” Rey replied. The lieutenant blushed.

  
She came closer to Rey. “It’s not like that. Listen… I know you and the General were close. When she passed, I know a lot of people almost jumped ship then. But we’ve got good people here. The fight isn’t over.” Rey agreed, but didn’t make any indication of it. There was good people here. As much as she wanted to gear up alongside them and take off to fight for what was good in the Galaxy, she couldn’t help but think of Jannah, off with Lando Calrissian somewhere. She thought of Finn. Soldiers who had grown up fighting for the First Order, stolen away as kids, brainwashed to fight for Snoke and Palpatine. Just like Ben. She couldn’t fight them directly. She had argued with Poe about it, his argument being that if Finn and Jannah had broken programming, others could too. The fact that they hadn’t meant their fight had fallen the other way.

  
Finn had told him that the Force was the only way he’d shaken it, that Poe was being naive because it made the fighting easier. But Rey also knew that part of the issue was that Poe didn’t know what the Force felt like. He couldn’t know what it felt like. “I… am going to see if there’s another way to end this war. One with hopefully less bloodshed than what we’ve had up til now,” Rey said. She didn’t elaborate further before climbing up into the X-Wing and starting its take-off sequence.

  
Now she sat above Ahch-To, the little planet where Luke Skywalker had found the ancient Jedi Temple. She made her way down into the atmosphere, and set coordinates for the island that the Temple was on. Her third visit, and perhaps her last. Luke had sought exile her, she had thought to do the same after she had almost killed Ben on the wreckage of the Death Star. She’d even considered bringing Ben back here had… Exogol gone differently from how it went. As she thought of Ben, not that he was far from her thoughts, especially when she could still feel him out there. He was distant, but he wasn’t fully gone. The feeling was different from after Crait, when the bond had gone dark for sometime. Then she’d felt it like a wall between them, one that at any moment could turn transparent into a window. Now it was more like a curtain, and she could feel him on the other side of it. He was still there, and not in the way that Luke and Leia were. She just had to find a way to pull him from out behind the curtain, or failing that, find her own way there.

  
The X-Wing hummed as it came into land. The only question now was where to start. She was once more at the base of a small semi-circular peninsula at the base of the rocky mountainous island. She powered down her ship, and then popped the glass over the cockpit. With that done she leaped from inside, a more flashy action than simply taking the ladder down, and one she had not practiced, but trusted she could maneuver comfortably with the Force. Except she landed harder than she expected. “Ow!” she was surprised at how her joints felt heavier when she landed. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she was also more taxed by this than she had anticipated.

  
BB-8 awkwardly maneuvered himself down out of the droid insert, which had been built for R2 astromech series droids rather than the smaller BB series. He chirped at Rey in admonishment. “I’m sorry, BB. I didn’t think of how the old ship wouldn’t be built for different droid sizes. I’ll make sure I patch it up before we leave. You didn’t have to come, you know.”

  
The spherical droid made a noise of protest, the head moving in conjunction with the body to dip and shift. “I… appreciate that. I’m sorry. I forget sometimes about Jakku. It feels like it was so long ago.” It made a noise of recompense. “I forgot you never came here with me either. It may be a little awkward but if you need me to carry you, it’s no trouble.” Another noise. “You’re light enough. But fine, stay with the ship if you want.”

  
The only problem with that was the fact that Rey wasn’t sure what her next steps truly were. Search through the few possession’s Luke had. Hope that the island caretakers hadn’t erased all signs of his presence. Hope that wherever they were, the things were not eagerly plotting their revenge for the last few times she’d been on their island. She shook her head and began climbing up the walkway to the little stone village. The caretakers were nowhere to be seen, but the huts that she and Luke had stayed in were still present. She saw that his no longer had a door, and she wondered if he’d had to use it to help fix the X-Wing she’d used. Which meant that he’d purposefully fixed it and then left it in the ocean for when he could make a scene out of it. She thought of the whole family, Han included, and wondered if Darth Vader had been as purposefully dramatic as his progeny. Ben’s grandmother, she wondered, an actress of some kind? He was the Prince of Alderaan based on Leia’s history, but Leia had been adopted, and had given Rey only sparse information about her birth mother. Rey had the sense that Leia never quite forgave her father, and she suspected that in her mind her true parents were the Organa’s. She had not changed her name after all, even once it had become public knowledge who Leia’s father was by blood.

  
The other hut, the one she’d been staying in, until Luke had unconsciously blasted it apart, was mostly - though not completely - rebuilt. This, she realized, was why she’d come back to Ahch-To. This was where she had felt most connected with Ben besides on Exogol itself. Perhaps there was something related to the Jedi here that could help her. Not the books, but the physical location of the temple itself. She’d read, mostly in passing, of a way to walk between moments in time. She’d thought it was a theory the Jedi had, but she couldn’t help but feel that the notes being in the Jedi text were part of the reason the Force had given her the time to translate sections of the histories before putting them on a headlong collision with the Final Order.

  
She heard a noise behind her, and turned, expecting to see a porg. While there were a few nestled around the village, the actual disturbance was BB-8 who was chattering at one of the porgs, a mechanical arm extended threatening it. “BB!” she exclaimed, “Let it be.” He turned his viewfinder to her and made an exasperated sound, but disengaged the lighter at the end of the arm. “This is their home, we should let them be. Besides, I need to keep going up to the temple. I didn’t think you were following.”

  
She started up the next set of stairs to the temple when she felt it. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, and for a brief moment she felt like she could see Ben just behind her. It was a different kind of sight, but he was there, alive. She turned, and in the time it took for her to do so, the feeling passed. But it was enough of a confirmation for her that her overall goal wasn’t… completely without merit. BB-8 made a questioning set of beeps. “He’s out there. I just felt him. We’re on the right track. Save Ben, find a way to end the war together, save the Galaxy. You and I, BB. We’ve got this.”

At the top of the stairs she found the Temple much the same way she’d last seen it. The main room was more akin to an antechamber, with several exits to the outside air, including the one that looked out over the ocean, where she’d begun her training. There was a pool in the middle of the chamber, and to one side there were archways that led to paths deeper into the Temple. She went first to the pool, looking at it again, she had seen that there were colored tiles underneath the still water of the pool, but looking at it without the panic of the First Order at her back, she began to make out the picture more clearly. She saw that the mosaic of the pool was different that she expected. There was a figure, half black tile and half white. The color surrounding it was the opposite in the color that that half was wearing, white surrounding black, and vice versa.

  
She thought of Luke’s comment, “powerful light and powerful dark” of what both Snoke and Palpatine had said in reference to the connection to herself and Ben. She knelt down next to the pool, not sure what her goal was, and touched the water with her right hand. How much had they not told her? Luke had spent so much of his life learning about the Jedi, but he was gone now. Who had he learned from at first? And what had he done when they were gone? She got up and looked out to the rock she’d once meditated on, and looked out over the water. The ocean was beautiful, a dark blue that seemed to roll across the landscape, not dissimilar to Mon Cala, but Ahch-To had far more islands, and so far as Rey knew there were no underwater citizens. It reminded her also of the sand dunes of Jakku but full of vitality in a way that her life growing up had not. She had seen Tatooine now, and suspected that Luke had grown up similar to herself, where the desert would not do.

  
As she looked, she suddenly felt a tug of the Force. Energy that had pulled her once before down into the dark cave beneath the island. She began to make her way down now. The cave had the reflective crystal surface, and when she’d asked, she’d found that she had no one to look back on, that she had to make her own way through the world. It was the same now, regardless of whether the former Emperor were actually her blood relative. But could she use the crystal there to search for the world between worlds? The place she hoped, believed, Ben was now.

  
The cave seemed less frightening now in the sunlight, and she no longer felt the questioning desire to see her “family” that she had seen before. Her hand met the crystal and found it cold and rough to the touch. It was mostly reflective, and she could see herself better in it now than when she’d first come down into the cave. “How do I find him?” she asked confidently. She pushed her will into the crystal, trying to tap into the Force that resided within. At first, there was no change, but then the crystal fogged over, and she saw what looked like a planet, a swamp, and a cave that was there under a tree. It was less helpful than she’d hoped for, working with the Light Side of the Force, but she knew better than to try to force it, which would be as good as calling out to the Dark.

  
“I suppose you don’t have any more help as to the question of my family, while I’m here at least,” she said. The mirror sat unchanged again for longer than she was hoping. But then it fogged over again. It cleared to show a building on Jakku, full of children. A group arriving in the building and blaster-fire echoed in her own head. A ship began to fly skyward, but was shot down. A man (Oche?) sat before her, and then the vision ended the same as her own memory, with the wide berthed ship flying away from Jakku while she was held by the arm. The vision ended there.

  
She sighed and pulled away from the crystal. This was only more confusing. Was her own memory wrong? What was the mirror trying to tell her? Or was it a confirmation of what she’d been told that she couldn’t correctly parse. In either case, she knew where she was going to head out to, Dagobah, a swamp planet that Leia had mentioned Luke had received Jedi training at. She’d been meaning to go for some time now, and the first vision only heightened that feeling for her. Luke had scoured the galaxy for information on the Jedi of old, but she wondered if he’d gone back to where he’d started. Was there more to uncover there he’d never seen?

  
BB-8 whirred at her once she was back up in the antechamber of the Jedi Temple. “Sorry, BB. Didn’t want to take you swimming.” She paused, “What does a droid like you even make of the Force, the Jedi, the Sith, all of it?” He tilted his head and made an accompanying set of trilling beeps. “I don’t know either,” she said.

  
It had been a short visit, and she still had to fix up the X-Wing for BB-8, but she felt renewed all the same. There were more questions now, but she had felt Ben, she knew wherever he was, he was still alive. There was information on the connection of Jedi and Sith, the mosaic in the pool was proof positive of that. She just needed to find it. But now she had a direction. Now she had her first steps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Chapter: Finn


	4. Shipyard to Shipyard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The crew of the Falcon arrives above Serenno, and Finn gets a lesson in the esteemed masters of C3-P0 and R2-D2.

# Finn 1

  
There were noises from the cockpit of the Falcon, where Poe and Chewie were working on bringing them down to Serreno. Rose was in her room, still reviewing the notes and information she had on Serreno. Finn sat on the main leather seat of the Falcon and stared at the deck of Pazaak Cards that lay on the table, unimpressed by the grimace on his face. Despite his rank of General of the Resistance he had never felt more alone. Rey, his first friend since he’d left the First Order was gone, and with her, any hope of having practical Jedi training. Jannah was gone as well, somewhere off with Lando taking care of other Resistance concerns on the stolen Bestoon Legacy ship they’d found on Pasaana. Poe and Rose were still around, but busy with other concerns. He knew he should be the same. He knew he should be focusing on his Jedi training, but still he found it hard. It had been a revelation when he’d met Jannah, and found that there were other troopers like him. He knew how Rey felt about the issue, and Poe, but he was still unsure of where he stood on the matter. Was it best for them to keep fighting the Imperial Remnant as though nothing had changed but leadership, or should they be looking for a way to undo what the training of the First Order had done to them?

  
C3-P0’s voice interrupted his thoughts, “Master Finn, do you need a partner for card playing? It is not my expertise, but I do know every rule of the many variations of playing Pazaak!” Finn looked up, and saw that the sleek golden droid was staring at him intently with a yellow light behind his viewfinders.

  
“No, Threepio,” he said, leaning back against the seat. He was tired. Each time he’d tried to tap into the Force, he got distracted by his own thoughts. How did the Jedi tune it all out? Was there a way to make it easier? The droid next to him, R2-D2 made beeping sounds. While he’d noticed the taller humanoid droid come in from the corner of his eye, he had not seen the small blue and white one roll in. How long had he been watching?

  
C3-P0 tilted his head to hear whatever the R2 unit had said, and then straightened up. “Concentrating to use the Force! Indeed, is that true Master Finn?” Finn was silent. It was rare he had felt dejected since he joined up with the Resistance, but here he was looking at a deck of cards and trying to use the Force. Poorly.

  
After a breath, he leaned forward again, hands on his face, dragging his cheeks down in an exaggerated manner, “It’s not untrue.” He looked from the two droids to the cards again, and tried to make them lift - mostly by thinking the thought lift, lift, lift - over and over again. The cards didn’t respond. Which of course they didn’t, which was something he would have expected more if he didn’t have the Force. But he knew he did. Above Exogol he had… felt things more intently than ever before. On Takodana he had felt the effects of Starkiller Base as the laser had hit the planets across the galaxy. He knew he had the Force. He just didn’t know why he couldn’t feel it now.

  
“We have been very gifted as droids!” C3-P0 was now saying, “Servants to five Jedi now!”

  
“Luke, Leia, Rey…” Finn listed off, “Who else?”

  
“Why Master Anakin and yourself now!” Threepio said ecstatically.

  
Finn was quiet. He looked over at the two droids, and shook his head. “I’m no Jedi. But who was Anakin?” He wondered how much he’d missed out on being raised by the First Order, was this standard education across the galaxy? Was there any sort of standard education across the galaxy?

  
“Anakin Skywalker was the father of Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa. He was an esteemed Jedi Knight and was the only Jedi Knight to serve on the Jedi Council without first being raised to the rank of Jedi Master, an incredible accomplishment! He then went on to serve Chancellor - later Emperor - Palpatine as the dark knight and enforcer Darth Vader. He was the one thought to have killed Emperor Palpatine shortly before the end of the last Galactic Civil War. Based on Rey’s report of what happened on Exogol it seems we were mistaken there,” Threepio said with what would be candor if he was human.

  
Finn considered it. “Interesting,” he said, “Threepio, you wouldn’t happen to have any recorded memories or thoughts of Anakin, would you?”

  
The droid seemed to be processing something, and R2 made another beeping sound at him before rolling off in the direction of the cockpit. “Why yes!” C3-P0 said, making his way over to the lounge that Finn was sitting at. “As a matter of fact, after my memory was restored by R2 on Ajan Kloss I do have my memory from the time of the Clone Wars. For much of that time I was Anakin’s droid.”  
“I’d like to learn more about him,” Finn said, “How did he get so great? Obviously… he didn’t stay that way, but he started off good, didn’t he?”

  
“Why the stories I could tell you!” C3-P0 said. And so he did. He began recounting stories from even before the Clone Wars, beginning with a story of small slave boy on a desert planet, constructing a droid from scrap pieces.

A few hours later, Finn went up to check on the cockpit. Poe was muttering under his breath, and Chewbacca was checking some sort of calculation on a side screen that he had set up as the co-pilot. “Everything alright up here?” he asked.

  
“Just peachy,” Poe said tersely, “We’re still waiting on coordinates from the Serennian government down below and we’ve gotten some transmissions from Inferno Squadron. Captain Shriv and his team have managed to gather some more ships from the front we have on Corellia, and have rendezvoused with The Colossus for transport.” So far this didn’t explain Poe’s tone when he’d replied.  
“So what… what didn’t go well?” Finn asked, casually taking a seat behind Chewie.

  
“They picked up some stragglers, First Order stragglers, and the nearest jump point they have to Telos will take them right through this system. Which would be fine, if we weren’t sitting up here in Serenno’s high atmosphere in the Millennium Falcon of all ships. They’ll mark us, Serenno will be compromised and we’ll have to lose a bunch of those nice new ships Shriv was able to scavenge before we’ve even gotten a chance to evaluate them and make upgrades.”

  
“What if we set a trap?” Finn suggested, leaning forward conspiratorially. Chewie made a groaning sound that Finn knew must be frustration, and Poe arched an eyebrow.

  
“You mean try and take them on,” Poe said, “We’d still lose people.”

  
“What if we get Serenno to come help us?” Finn suggested, “If we get their ships and are able to put them to good use we can prove that the Resistance means business and that we’re not just stragglers for the First Order to come pick off. If we’re serious about taking the fight back to them, we have to start somewhere, and it’s a good place to send a statement to the rest of the galaxy that we’re willing to defend the people who want to help us. Serenno,” he got quiet here, “Serenno never has to know that the First Order wasn’t here for them and just here for us.”

  
“Alright,” Poe said, drawing in a breath and looking at Finn with some surprise, “That’s more devious than I normally expect out of you, Commander. But I don’t dislike your plan. How’ll we win them over enough to send us some back up though?”

  
It was Rose who came suddenly to Finn’s aid, “Let me talk to them. I can win them to the cause and hopefully get us the ships we need.”

  
“Okay, great,” Poe said, forming plans in his head, “There should still be a small one-person shuttle on here, right Chewie? As long as that’s got fuel-” Chewie cut him off with a sentence in Wookiee that made no sense to Finn.

  
“I… swear,” Poe said quietly, “Even when she’s not here that girl is ruining my plans. Alright! New new plan. Rose, you’re on mic. We need to land ASAP. Serenno has incoming First Order ships, and we’re here to help, but we need some back-up.”

  
“On it,” Rose nodded diligently, and then called out, “C3-P0, I need you up here.”

  
Finn, realizing the cockpit of the Falcon was starting to get a little too crowded for his comfort started nodding, and got up to head back to the main lounge space. “Right, right,” he said, “Keep me posted if you need me on a turret.”

  
“Hopefully it won’t come to it,” Poe said, “But I like your instinct. Just in case.” He gave Finn a charming smile and a wink as he said it, and the former Stormtrooper didn’t know how to react. It hadn’t caused the same reaction as when they were bantering. It felt more… private than that. He realized he didn’t know how he felt about either Rose or Poe, and how could he, he rationalized, he was raised in the First Order. They were tools, not people. That was what he was comfortable with. Time for him to go be a tool, he thought, get ready to hop on a turret at the first sign of trouble. He wasn’t a pilot, and he had come to grips with the fact that he never would be. But it didn’t make him feel any less useless when so many of their dogfights came down to risky piloting rather than precision shots.

  
“Go on, Mr. Protocol,” he teased C3-P0 as the droid and him passed in the hall, “it’s nice to be useful for something.”

  
“Indeed, Master Finn,” said the droid as it continued on. Finn bit his lip, thinking of how nothing and everything seemed to bother that droid at the same time.

  
He was back in the lounge, wishing that there was more, anything he could do. “Come in Serenno One, yes we hear you,” he heard Rose saying from down the hall, “Turns out we’re not the only ones who need to worry about the Imperial Remnant.” It had been her idea to change the name of the First Order, though Finn had trouble renaming it in his head, even with the leaders all gone. Even Phasma had failed to reappear after he had fought her on the Supremacy. Which left who? Who was in charge of this Imperial Remnant now? It was a question they’d been asking themselves since the battle on Exogol. Snoke had been Supreme Leader, then Kylo Ren, then Palpatine. Now all of them were gone, if Rey were to be believed. Which left them with an Imperial Remnant that was running more on the inertia of those that had come before than it was actually accelerating on it’s own.

  
He made his way into the center of the lounge and sat down, looking across at R2-D2, the little droid that had probably better comprehended all the journeys that had come before than C3-P0 did. “So, Jedi who weren’t the best pilots, when the time came for battle, what would they do, Artoo?” he asked. The little cylindrical droid trilled something back in binary. He just shook his head, “Someday I’m going to understand whatever it is you’re saying.”

  
“We’ve got clearance to land, Finn!” Poe called from the front of the ship, “Get ready for descent.”

  
He brought them in a little quicker than Finn had expected, but he supposed that they were in rather a rush. Rose came back to where Finn was, and tossed him a blaster. “What’s this for?” he asked.  
“We’re on the ground, and while we’re there, you’re my bodyguard,” she said casually, “I’ve got diplomacy that I need to do, and Serenno is gonna use some of their best shots on the Falcon’s turrets. Plus it’ll help build trust with Poe as a leader to some of them. The more and sooner we can build loyalty the better.”

  
“That seems…” he didn’t know how to finish the sentence. Cold? Devious? What were they becoming here to help save the galaxy?

  
“It’s politics, yes,” she said, “But if they’re willing to help here, I’d rather let them give a hand than be in their way for the sake of all of us sitting in the same ship together.”

  
“What if they turn on Poe?” he asked.

  
“He’s got Chewie here, and he could take anyone with an arm tied behind his back. Are you worried?” she asked. He couldn’t tell if she were teasing him or being genuine. He’d never been the best at reading people.

  
“Of course I’m worried,” he said, “I’m… I’m used to going into battle is all. I’m not ready to sit away from where the real danger is.”

  
“Well good,” she said, and laughed, “Where we’re going will be the real danger.” She saw that he didn’t join in the laugh and squat down next to where he was sitting, slumped against the table of the Falcon’s lounge. “Listen, I know you’re worried for Poe, and worried about what will happen if we’re not here to help out, but the galaxy needs our help in other ways. If we can secure the ships from Serenno and bring them back to Telos we’re well on our way to having a fleet. If we have a fleet, we have the power to at least begin negotiating with whoever is leading the Imperial Remnant. The sooner we begin negotiating, the sooner we can begin lessening aggression, and once we do that, we can bring peace to the galaxy. I don’t like dealing with planetary leaders either, but think of Leia told us once we’d gotten the aid of Mon Cala. It’s not the Chancellor sitting high up in Coruscant one day who we’re fighting for, but for the farm boy who wants to get off of his family farm and out into the galaxy without being caught up in war, it’s the kid who has to steal for a living unless we make the galaxy a better place.”

  
She was quiet for a moment, letting Finn digest all she said. “Now come on, I do genuinely need a body guard down there,” she said with a smile. As she helped him to his feet, she continued her speech, “Remember those kids we met on Canto Bight? I think about them a lot and… that’s where Jannah and Lando are. Lando’s helping us clean that awful place up, and it’s our separate campaign against the actual war machine itself. I… thought you should know.”

  
He nodded silently, realizing that it did in fact cheer him up to think about Canto Bight getting cleaned up, even if it meant that Jannah and Lando were going to be away. “At least you gave me a concrete job,” he said, faking a smile, “cleaning up Canto Bight is a complicated sounding mission.”

  
She smiled back, and led him towards the Falcon’s entrance. It opened outward and Poe was suddenly behind them, a smile on his face. “Be ready for anything,” he said, “Serenno is a very proud culture.”

  
Waiting for them was a delegation of about seven people, all dressed in similar outfits. The ship was on a platform, not unusual for anywhere in the galaxy that had a shipyard, and indeed as they stepped off of the Falcon, Finn could see other ships on other docks, people rushing to get them ready for combat by the looks of things. They had been prepared to fight, and now the Resistance had arrived with open arms to give them a cause.

  
The commandos, or that’s what Finn chalked them up as, were wearing dark and tight outfits, crisp military uniforms that made Finn wonder how long they’d been ready to fight even while sitting out from the war. The leader was a man in a tight brown jacket that had one set of buttons on his right, and came to a turtleneck neckline. “Welcome, Commander Dameron, Delegate Tico, and I beleive it was… Commander Finn, is it?” the leader said, addressing each of the Resistance leaders in turn. His hair was slicked back and dark, his eyebrows thick and full, and his skin light in color. “I am the Duke of Serreno, and I am pleased to make your acquaintance.” His next words were enough to throw Finn completely off balance after his recent history lessons with C3-P0. “You may call me Count Gora, the last remaining heir of House Serenno,” the man said with a bow and a flourish.

  
The commandos started to head onto the ship. “Pleasure’s all ours, Count,” Poe said, “I’ll be right back with your men, once we take care of the nuisance in your region of space.” The Count nodded as the soldiers began to head onto the Falcon, and Finn saw other ships beginning to rise into the air.

  
“I hardly doubt this will require so many ships, your excellency,” Rose said, also seeming to note how many other ships were rising into the air. In punctuation the sky was filled suddenly by the Colossus, with a Star Destroyer so soon on it’s heels that they might as well have jumped into the region together. It seemed for a moment like Rose was right. And then more Star Destroyers begin to jump in, bringing the total up to three. And then more. Soon there were seven Star Destroyers in the sky, and Finn realized that they weren’t just in for a fight. The whole war was now here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last of the "trio" introduced by TFA has his chapter now. These will probably get more interconnected as the chapters go, and characters will probably get split even further from here, but while I liked the idea of the trio being "alone" at first, I also thought that Finn feels his alone-ness in a different way from Ben and Rey. Almost so much that he doesn't even realize he feels alone?


	5. A Swamp, A Jedi, and A Vision

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey continues her journey to find Ben. Following what she saw on Ahch-To, she follows Luke's journey to Dagobah.

# Rey 2

  
From space, Dagobah had looked nothing like what Rey had expected. It had far more green and blue than she had expected, but she had never been through a swamp before so she had had no idea what she was going to see when she arrived. “Of all the planets I was left on, Beebee, why was I stuck on somewhere so devoid of life?” she asked, trying not to let bitterness enter into her voice, though that was a difficult task on it’s own. Down on the planet, she wasn’t sure that she would have been all that better left here. If anything, she was now unsure she would have even survived on Dagobah as long as she had on Jakku.

As soon as she was in low atmosphere she could feel a pull from the Force. While the rest of the planet felt heavy, like she had come to expect from the Dark Side of the Force, there was a part of it, a small bit of swamp, that felt clean. It was different though, from the other places she could remember that were strong in the Force. Typically they were light or they were dark. This was… a place that had been Dark and had since been purified. She didn’t know how she could feel that differently. Like most things in the Force it just made a certain kind of sense to her. It was as though the planet were a crystal that had been chipped and stained, and though the stain was gone and the chip filled back in, there was still a scar where the chip had fixed itself.

Within sight of where she landed there was a small hut, made of some clay-like material, the kind she had seen tons of on Tatooine. From inside there was a soft blue glow. She shook her head and started to head that way, “Master Luke, why did you make me come all the way here?” But as she got closer she realized the glow was not coming from the Force Specter of the old Jedi, it was instead coming from a different one.

“Look like my pupil, do I?” the new figure asked, “Bad he looks now, or great I do.”

“I’m sorry, I just…” she was so caught off-guard that words failed her.

“Assumed you did. Around I was, after a visit with another would-be Jedi. This active, I normally am not,” he said.

“You must be Master Yoda,” she cried, putting the speech with the stories Leia had gotten from Luke about his Jedi Master. “Other would-be Jedi? Do you mean Finn, Master Yoda?”

The little Jedi shook his incorporeal head, “This Finn, I know not. Work I did with a Jedi more experienced than yourself. Less a Jedi, all the same.”

“Ben!” she cried, “He…” then she hesitated, taking in truly what Yoda was now, and the thought came that if Yoda had been speaking with him, there was a strong possibility that he had not been doing it on any known planet.

“Mourn, we should not, those who have given themselves over to the Force,” Yoda said wisely, “The Force, knows the way it does.”

“But it took him!” she said angrily at the little ghost, “He tried to save my life… he did save it, and the Force took him from me. I haven’t even… I haven’t even been able to see him as a… whatever you are since he disappeared.” She realized that her shock had left her numb for so long, she had not even truly had time to grieve. She felt so sure he was out there, but that had partially been to stave off the yawning dread of the possibility of life alone once more. It had not hit her until now that her efforts could be truly fruitless, and Ben could already be truly permanently gone.

She fell to her knees in this muddy swamp, grateful at least that she was out of her white clothes and into her newer black outfit. “It’s not fair,” she said, pitifully. She knew she sounded childish saying it, but that’s what it came to. For all of her own existential fear of loneliness, for all her memories of the man who seemed to be made of power and a heart tarnished by years of trauma, what it came down to was feeling a hand brush hers across the galaxy, an all too brief kiss, and then the intense shock of losing the people she’d cared most about. No matter how hard she tried, she was abandoned, time and again. She should be on rolling green fields, surrounded by forests and lakes, with Ben; not kneeling in the all too warm, humid, and sticky swamp speaking to a long gone Jedi Master.

The space was overwhelming with the sounds of animals in the distance, and trees that were snake-like, coiling and poisonous in their appearance, at least up unto the clearing where the remnants of Yoda’s hut stood covered in flowering vines. Here the land, though still a swamp, was more cleared, covered in less acrid plant matter. It was muddy, but not up to her ankles, like the location she’d landed at. It was humid, but not suffocating. All the same, her tears were still hot on her face.

“Fair, the Force is not,” Yoda agreed, “Intercede another did, on your behalf. Done with the progeny of Skywalker, the Force is not.”

She didn’t comprehend the full meaning of his words at first, caught in her own sorrow. “No, it tortures the son of Skywalkers and the daughter of Palpatine,” she said moping. Then it dawned on her. “Wait, it’s not done with him? Or is there another living Skywalker?”

“A hard question to answer, that is,” Yoda said, “Your family, know them still, you do not.”

“My family I do know,” she said, standing up and jabbing her finger at the little Jedi, “Ben’s family is my family. I don’t care about my blood. My parents sold me, my grandfather tried to take over the whole of the galaxy.”

He shook his head, and turned to go into his hut, his translucent feet moving as they were actually carrying him over the ground. “Eager you are, to say you know yourself. Love,” he paused at the word, hesitated before continuing, “Little of it, I know. Compassion, the most important trait of the Light, it is. Love, Compassion it must be, possessive… it becomes destructive. Fall to the Darkness, many have because of so-declared love.”

“To the swamp, you must go,” Yoda said, “The next part of the journey, you must attend to. Master Luke, told you he did, that you must avoid the dark, and run from it? To the darkest part, you must go.”

“And what if I fall?” she asked, “What if I prove my grandfather right?”

“Prove your grandfather?” he asked, then hesitated, “Palpatine, you think? Prove him wrong, already you have. Afraid to do it one more time, you may be, but fear… a Jedi does not succumb to fear.”

“Perhaps I’m not a Jedi,” Rey said, lifting her chin as she said it, her hand missing the comfortable weight of her staff, it was no longer as helpful for a walking staff now that she had converted it into a true lightsaber. She gathered herself to her feet and looked off into the swamp, pushing the Force out of herself, searching for any indication from the land where she should go.

Yoda chuckled, “A Jedi, I do not think you will be. But your choice, I think it is.” With that last cryptic statement, Yoda faded. She turned back briefly to look at the spot where he’d been, and as she did, she felt it. The Dark was everywhere here, but in most of the planet it felt like an oozing slime, an unpleasant reality of the world she was on. Yet as she turned, it was like she suddenly felt a distant, open wound. The Dark emanated from here as though it were a sore, with blood spurting forth. That was where she had to go, according to Yoda.

The trek through the swamp was largely uneventful in and of itself. Once she was out of the clearing where the hut had been built, the land became more standing stagnant water, but was more punctuated by large trees that snaked over each other, and created an alternative path through the space, more like the short course that she and Leia had devised for her continual training. It suited her, if there was any trouble she’d had in training it was the meditation, the thinking on one thing for too long. If she did that, she would start to think of things she did not like to recall. Memories that came not just unbidden, but unwelcome. Action was easier. She did not know how many times she’d run the course that she and Leia had set up in the year between the battle of Crait and the strike on Exogol. Even then, she’d been unable to let herself think about what had happened on the Supremacy. When Finn had told her later that he and Rose had barely escaped the capital ship… she had said little more than that she’d seen what happened to it, and dared not say that she had actually been on it at the time.

Now she found herself at the base of a tree that reminded her of the little study that Luke Skywalker had kept the ancient Jedi texts in visually, from it there was a small outpouring of mist and fog, and the area was obscured beyond the basic details of the space. “Okay,” she said to herself, “Into the unknown.” She had no idea how far she’d come through the swamp. She had been following a magnet more than tracking something in particular, and as a result she had only been able to follow a vague feeling. “Does the Force ever work in concretes?” she whispered, as she entered the space beneath the tree. There was no light down here, and though she looked for a torch or some other way to create a light for herself there was none at hand. It was only reluctance that made her pull her lightsaber staff from her back and ignite one of the blades.

Yellow light, nearly orange in hue, flooded the space. It was larger inside than she had expected, and she could not help but wonder if the entrance overhead with the tree was a facade to make the space seem more natural than it actually was. As she looked around her suspicions were seemingly confirmed. The walls were made of stone, and patterns were carved into them, lines and figures that reminded her of… the temple on Ahch-To. “A Jedi Temple, here?” she whispered. If what Luke had said about the temple on Ahch-To was true, than it was likely the first Jedi Temple that had been built. But looking at the one she was in, the stone looked more cracked, more broken, and just from what she could feel, it felt older.

Could this be a temple of the Force from before the time of the Jedi? If there were Force users who used the Dark and Light indiscriminately before the Jedi had restricted craft, it would make sense that the Dark could have eventually won out here on Dagobah until Yoda had come along. Or could it be a Jedi Temple that just felt older because Dagobah was naturally more destructive to architecture than Ahch-To had been? Rey realized she had no idea how to even begin to answer that question.

The walls were scored with marks that looped and trailed across the walls like trails of cloud from an in-atmosphere ship pulling stunt maneuvers. She wondered without meaning to when the last time the galaxy had been at real peace. If the Empire had truly become the First Order and now evolved into the Imperial Remnant, how could the time between now feel like anything but a false pretense of peace. A temporary win in an ongoing struggle rather than victory in the fighter’s time. It still felt so out of reach, and she wondered if the people here had felt the same. There was the Dark Side here, and she couldn’t help but wonder if that was due to conflict within this temple.

The deeper she went, the colder she felt. She had not noticed it upon entering the structure, but she was shivering by the time she could no longer see the entrance. The hallway she’d come in on stretched forth and down, with the wall carvings continuing on ahead. After several minutes of walking down this tunnel with no visible change besides how far down she must be at this point, the space suddenly opened up. There was about ten meters above from where the tunnel exited that ended in ceiling, and then an unknown distance down. Around the wall there was a thin stairway that was partially crumbled and rounded, though luckily each step was long enough she did not have much to worry about in sliding her heel down one, tumbling onto her butt and sliding the rest of the way down the temple. She started down, worried that she would at some point soon reach a point of no-return.

She shivered again in the cold and then steeled herself. “I am the last Jedi,” she told herself, trying to boost her confidence, but as she said it, the words felt wrong in her mouth. Why would she want to bear their burdens when she had known the truth of their end? Their legacy ended with a family that was supposedly chosen by the Force itself, perhaps for the very purpose of ending the Jedi as they had been. Was she going in contest to the Force is she continued on with being a Jedi? Perhaps, she thought as she traced her hand along the wall of the tunnel leading down, she was better off letting the Jedi become a memory. The temple was older than living memory, and yet, there was only one person left who had any sort of sense what that story had become, and even here she was mostly going off old, printed texts that she’d only had a year to work on translating. Not even a full year, as they’d had to work on it in bits and pieces while C3-P0 had started to get familiar with the actual grammatical setup of the ancient Jedi. Now his memories of that were gone, replaced with a backup that only came to right before the space siege above Crait.

Her blade gave off some heat, and she was already worried of dropping it and letting it fall all the way down this central shaft, which left her holding it closer to her body than was useful to observe the area. She could barely see a few feet ahead of her, and the deeper she went, the more the mist met her. After walking for what had to be an hour, the mist thickened, and she saw that ahead of her, she would be at a point where visibility was nonexistent, as though the very space were telling her that she was crossing into some unbidden threshold. Except unbidden was not correct. She could feel the Force drawing her forward. Although she had no real reason to do so, she drew a deep breath and then walked into the place where she lost visibility.

As she did, she was back on Jakku. The desert sun beat down on her and the fallen Star Destroyers waited for her to go to them and pick their corpses in hopes that she could find just one more thing. She drew her goggles down from her forehead and onto her face, returning the mask she’d once worn like it was no effort. She turned to her side, and found her speeder - if you could call it that - waiting for her. As she sped off towards the Destroyer, she heard the sounds of approaching speeders.

She turned, and saw them, four pursuers on her tail. They were dressed in dark outfits, and from their masks she could instantly discern them as Knights of Ren. Following her, seeking to bring her forth to Palpatine, or Ren. A blaster shot rang out from where they chased, and she had barely enough time to dip her speeder to the side so that she could avoid the attack. As her speeder tilted though, the shot scored the side where her net held items she’d already scavenged for the day. She cried out in frustration, and barely managed to react fast enough to grab some scrap that looked relatively heavy. She spared a moment to glance back again.

They had gained on her. Their speeders were faster, their pursuit heedless of anything but her. She snarled, and tossed the scrap behind her, vaguely at one of them. She waited a moment, until it looked like it was about halfway down, and shoved out with the Force, driving the scrap through the vehicle the night was on, and managing to scrape one of the others that was forced to dodge out of the way. Seizing her moment, she turned sharply, into a tunnel of scrap she knew better than they. It had been foolish of them to pursue her here. This was her home, this was where she’d lived who knew how long in futile hope that her family would find her again.

Two managed to make it into the tunnel, and the one in front fired. She dodged again, though only barely, her speeder unable to sustain itself after the partial shred that the blaster bolt managed to do. She could feel the engine failing on her between her legs, and she swore quietly under her breath. There was no recourse she saw, no way to get out of this by only injuring them slightly. She took another sharp turn, then sped her bike around, so it was now angled into face off with the knights. When they rounded the bend, she put her energy into a leap, and let the bike speed off without her. The leap wasn’t as strong as she’d hoped, and she fell more than a graceful landing. She pushed herself up quickly to see that the tunnel was less narrow than she remembered, or the bike had not gone as fast as she’d hoped, as she was now only a few moments from being caught.

She threw the last of her remaining energy downward, her hands moving like they were pushing something at her waist, and the Force responded. The walls of the tunnel shook, and then shot inward. Just like that, crushing the knights. She stopped, desperate to catch her breath. As she turned and walked further down the tunnel, it melted around her. She stepped down out of the mist, lightsaber at her side.

A vision, a prophecy, a potential past. She had no idea what had just happened, what she had just experienced. But she saw there was another ring of mist below. The Force had more for her to see. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long breaks between chapters! Updating come between non fan-fiction writing and an 8-5 job! I've got tons of ideas (even most character endings) in mind, but the beginning is going to be the hardest to get through.


	6. War Heroes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben's journey continues...

# Ben 2

  
His connection to Rey went slack. More slack then it had when he’d first entered into this space between worlds. For a moment he worried that Rey was dead. It was crushingly similar to that moment on Exogol. Where he’d been alone again. His heart seized in his chest, and he felt like he was outside of his own head. There would be no point in returning if she was not there. Then, just as fast, she was back. He wondered what trials she was going through, if they were still fighting the First Order out there. He had known that he had a long way to go once the fight with Palpatine was over, and he’d hoped that stopping the war would have been a good first step. Now there was no hope of him doing such.

He shook his head and lifted his red blade up higher, revealing more of the pathway. In the distance, he saw a faint glow, not dissimilar to how he’d first seen Yoda earlier. Earlier, though he had no concept of how much time had passed, or if time even passed here at all. He no longer ached and hurt as he had at the end of the fight against Palpatine, but he wondered if that was because he was closer to death than life anyway. As he approached, the figure coalesced, began to take a more human shape. Indeed, by the time it was fully realized, the person Ben was looking at was a human, though one who’d passed on into the Force. As he appeared before Ben he was short in height, but athletic in build. His face would likely have been sharper looking if not for the splash of beard that covered his chin, and his mustache looked full on his face. His hair was swept back, and had the look of someone who’d run their hands through it time and time again.

Ben would have expected to see a man like this in the ceremonial Jedi robes, but instead, he was wearing a half-plated trooper armor with pauldrons that had the symbol of the Republic on them. He wore a cloak that fit under the vestments of battle, and had wrapped it around his legs as he waited, presumably for Ben. “It is interesting,” the man said as he approached, his voice light, as though he were on the edge of making a joke, “How the Force refuses to let us forget our lives, even after they have supposedly ended. I would not have expected to take this form today, and I do not know if it so you will see me this way, or so that I will remember who I was at my worst.”

“At your worst?” Ben said, confused, “I don’t understand. You look like a knight, a hero.” He had a suspicion of who this man was, but did not want to jump to conclusions at this moment. The Force had yet to give him a gift, and he was wary of something that seemed like it was.

The man smiled, and stood. “Walk with me, please. It would seem that I was right on both accounts.” He stood himself, and went to fold his arms, going through the motions that Ben suspected would result in him covering both arms with both sleeves, realizing he had none, he instead settled on walking with them crossed. Ben noticed that there was a lightsaber at the knight’s hip, and he wondered if a ghost could even make use of a lightsaber.

“I apologize, having been one with the Force as long as I have, it has been some time since I’ve introduced myself to someone new. You may know me already, but for the sake of formality, you may call me Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Ben, as the situation fits,” the Jedi ghost told him with a genuine bow. Ben felt his brain short-circuit. Yoda, had of course been a figure in Luke’s stories of the Jedi. A crazy old trickster as Luke told it. But Ben Kenobi was THE Jedi hero. Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader, Ben had always felt a connection to, a man who’d tried to give everything for his family. But Obi-Wan had been a hero of the Republic, the last hope his mother had turned to in order to save the Republic, and the man who had given his life to save Ben’s entire family.

He found himself suddenly on the verge of stuttering. Though he had never felt like this before, he realized this is how many must have felt when communicating with any number of his family members. Ben bowed deeply. “I would be remiss to call you anything other than Master Kenobi. I am… Ben Solo, I believe you knew my parents and my Jedi Master, Luke. They named me after you.”

Obi-Wan gestured with one arm that they begin walking. Ben straightened after a moment and began to follow. “I knew your family well,” Kenobi said, “I am honored to meet you. For so long, I… have wanted to communicate with you, with your entire generation of fighters. But until recently, we were blocked by the work of Darth Sidious.”

“You mean Palpatine?” Ben asked.

“I mean Sidious,” Kenobi restated flatly, “Palpatine was a mask that he wore. For so long we thought of him as a man who had sought to rule the galaxy, to bring it all to heel by him. We were wrong. At his core, he was a Sith, a necromancer who worked to bring about some sort of dark ritual by which he hoped to live forever. He hoped to use the one you love most as a conduit for that energy, though his ultimate goal was you.”

“Why me?” Ben asked, “She was his own blood, surely that mattered more to him.”

“She was not,” he said bluntly, “He had no blood. I once made Luke deeply upset by hiding a similar truth from him, and I like to think I am slightly better than that now. Of course, the situation is more… complicated than you understand at this time, but I will leave the rest for Rey to discover, and for Rey to tell you once you are reunited.”

“When will I be able to reunite with her?” Ben asked, torn between his desire to speak like a Jedi to the ultimate Jedi and his eagerness to see Rey again, to be with her again, to hold her once more in his arms.

“Not until you finish your own journey,” Obi-Wan said calmly, “The Force is not yet done with you, though your defeat of Sidious has marked a closing of a chapter in the fight between the Light and the Dark. A chapter that was opened by the foolish actions of yours truly.”

“You didn’t start the Clone Wars,” Ben said, “That was the Separatists.”

“It is even more complicated than that,” Obi-Wan told him, “But the Jedi should have been able to put an end to the war, not simply add fuel to the fire of the Republic’s War efforts. The clones were… victims, just as much as the people of the Galaxy. The Jedi were responsible and we let the whole order fall to the Dark Side. Though I’m sure Luke has told you all of this before.”

“It… he never got the opportunity to tell me,” Ben said. Obi-Wan nodded solemnly, letting him breeze past the unspoken reason Luke had never gotten that opportunity. They moved in companionable silence and Ben held his tongue. Once the floodgate of questions was open, he did not know that he would ever bring himself to be able to stop. He was speaking to the Hero of the Republic. “You… knew my grandfather, didn’t you?”

Kenobi nodded, and they continued in silence. “Is that the only question you have for me?”

Ben was quiet for another moment, and it felt like there was some younger part of him that begged to speak out. “I have so many questions for you, but I… I don’t know where to begin. I could ask questions for hours.”

“We have nothing but time here,” Kenobi said, a wry smile coming to his face, his arms sweeping out to the sides, “But I do not think it is my place to tell you this story. A shame, in some ways, that it is you who is here, as the story would be well told to others strong in the Force.”

“Rey,” Ben said, “Is she the last Jedi now?”

Kenobi made a gesture of uncertainty with his hand. “To call her a Jedi is perhaps a… generational misnomer. Luke himself had very little formal training in the Force, and his study of the Jedi was in many ways similar to her own, as it was mostly focused through study of old Jedi and their knowledge that he came to be known as a “Jedi” so to speak. She is as much a Jedi as Luke was, and Luke was both more and less a Jedi than myself.”

“What do you mean?” Ben asked.

“The spirit of Jedi was to be in concert with the Force, to allow it to work through us. We were the tools for something that creates peace within and across the galaxy. The Jedi were supposed to be peace keepers, not in the sense that we went across the galaxy righting all wrongs, but in the sense that the Force was not used against it’s own purpose. The Sith used the Force as a tool, in contrast the Force used the Jedi as a tool. That was the way it was, and why the Sith brought the Force as a greater entity out of balance.”

“But the purpose of the old Jedi was first to bring themselves to inner balance. That was the “training” that a Jedi went through. In that sense, no Jedi has been formally trained since before even Master Yoda’s time. The story of the Jedi is one of lost purpose, and the Jedi becoming a group more akin to the Sith then they were ever supposed to be. In that way Sidious did not win, because the war for the soul of the Jedi was already lost. Whatever Rey may want to call herself, she will likely be more aligned to the truth of the Jedi than the council I served on.” He gestured to the armor he was wearing. “We were made into soldiers, generals in a military. We had truly lost our way, trying to bring exterior balance to the galaxy without first seeking inner balance. We taught ourselves to repress emotion, when we should have been learning how to live with the emotions that came to us. People saw us as you see me, heroic, bold, daring. We should never have been this. We should have been able to find peace.”

“Marriage,” Kenobi continued, “was an issue to the Jedi Council, and one that was handled poorly at the beginning of this long mess. Once, long ago, there was fear of a Jedi marrying a person of power. A senator or a king, and influencing the galaxy on a broad scale.” Ben thought of his time, however brief, as Kylo Ren as the ruler of the First Order. “So marriage between Jedi and people of privilege was outlawed. I think now that was perhaps too hasty a decision. A ruler can step down, and a Jedi forming a union with a former ruler has no harm in the way that a Jedi marrying a Duchess would be.”

“But even there, there is hubris. A Jedi could leave the order, acting outside the capacity of the Jedi as a body. There is no harm there. The Jedi were not, and never should have been thought of as the sole source of light in the galaxy. Many left the Order, and many who did, were right to do so. Have you heard of Ahsoka Tano?” Kenobi asked.

“No,” Ben admitted.

“I am taking you to meet her now. She will be able to better explain her story, but she was the only formal pupil of Anakin Skywalker. She left the Jedi Order before the Purge, and afterword she joined the Rebellion. She was discovered by Vader, and was thought to have died after saving the lives of other Jedi who would go on to aid the Rebellion up until Luke arose.”

It was a lot for Ben to learn all at once. The Jedi had survived the Purge more thoroughly than Luke had ever thought, and they had not returned to save the galaxy when the First Order had arisen. At least he had never had to fight any other trained force sensitive besides Rey and the Knights of Ren. “Is she still out there?” Ben asked, “Am I to return to my time and find her there?”

“Not as such no,” Kenobi admitted, gesturing again uncertainty, “She is outside the known galaxy with other survivors of the Purge. I will be taking you to another point in her timeline. She has just been saved by being brought here, similar to yourself. She has just confronted Vader and learned of the World Between Worlds. You will meet with her, train under her until you can find another entrance.”

“My saber,” Ben said, holding the hilt to Obi-Wan, “What do I do with it? She’ll recognize it as a tool of the Dark Side.”

“She is more attuned to the Force than you give her credit, Ben,” Kenobi told him, “She is more aware of what your lightsaber is than you are, and she will show you the way forward. Luke may have been Anakin’s son, but seeing you, I’m sure she will mark you as the heir to Anakin’s place in the Force.”

Ben had not noticed due to the conversation, but Kenobi had led them to another portal under one of the tree-like shapes of this liminal space. Through it, he could see a world that was cracked and scarred, with figures in repose, but made of ash or stone. “Where is this?” Ben asked. He looked over at Kenobi, and wondered if the Force Ghost could sense his fear.

“Malachor,” Kenobi said, “An old planet, and a site of war. You are an empathetic being. Be prepared to feel the conflict here.” Ben nodded, and then following Kenobi’s gesture, he stepped up to the portal.

“Thank you,” Ben said, wanting to turn to the old Jedi but finding himself paralyzed even now, “I… see that I was named after a man well worth his legacy. One I have treated poorly.”

“You have not treated it poorly,” Kenobi said comfortingly, “Your story has not yet ended, and I was just a man. Talk of legacy is… pish posh. It is enough to me to know that the blood of my dearest friend thinks of me fondly.” For the briefest moment, it felt to Ben like there was a hand on his shoulder, a comforting presence, but when he turned to finally face his namesake again, the ghost was gone.

Not knowing fully what awaited him on the other side, Ben stepped through the portal.

The first thing he felt, was heat. The space was dry, more so then the plethora of ships he had been on that were kept artificially dry, it was dry in the way of a desert, and to his mind immediately recalled the last time he had been on a desert, where he had provoked Rey. She had used lightning then, in a sequence of events that still made little sense in his recollection. Yes, he had known that Rey was capable of great anger and was more than powerful in both sides of the Force, but the Force, as he remembered from his time at Luke’s fledgling academy, was not genetic. Indeed, what Kenobi had said made it make even less sense, as Rey was not a Palpatine. Which meant what? That her Force abilities were going haywire independent of her?

Or, given where he was now, the abilities would be going haywire. In the future. Only moments here and his brain was already unsure how to process this sort of information. He focused and took a deep breath. Here was a time where he had not yet done anything, his damage to the universe had not yet come to pass. If he could find a way to find Han Solo or Leia Organa, make it so that he never was, perhaps the universe would be in a much better state. Obi-Wan had sent him here to meet Ahsoka, and that would be his first step, but what if the goal was to fix the galaxy in a way far more grand than he had anticipated. It was only fair that he be the one to put an end to the menace of Kylo Ren, again.

He took in his new surroundings. The place he had exited from was an obsidian stone behind him now, and he wondered what fluctuation in the Force allowed people to come here without any sort of path back to the space between. The room was shaped like a pod of sorts, with a domed ceiling and a small outcropping of rock where he stood. Despite the dryness of the space around him, he could see a liquid of some amount pooling at the edge of the rock, with two small streams pouring down a set of stairs at the far end of the room.

From that space, he saw a glow, and wondered if he was here to meet yet another ghost. Then, down the stairs came a young Tortuga woman, dressed in brown Jedi-like gear, and carrying a lightsaber with a white glow to it. She looked roughly of an age with Ben as he was now, and her face was set into a scowl as she came down the stairs into the room with him.

“Who,” she asked, “Are you?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No retcons here about the time travel in the SW universe, but Ben certainly doesn't know the rules yet. I think timeline-wise, this will allow Ben to have spent as many months outside of the WBW as Rey and the rest of the crew has, depending on how things go obviously. Also, figured that you can obviously draw more direct lines of parallel between Ben and Anakin than Luke to either of them; and while Vader seems to have loved Luke more fully than Ahsoka, Ahsoka clearly was closer with Anakin on a personal level, which makes her a character very interesting to interact with for Ben.


	7. Gathering Allies

# Rose 1

She watched the Falcon take back off, filled with the soldiers of Serreno. Finn stood behind her and slightly to the side, C3P0 on her other side. Neither had spoken since Count Gora had introduced himself. Finn had sputtered quietly, and though she thought she was the only one who’d heard him she made a mental note to talk to him about not giving away his emotions. He had always been expressive, and Rose had found that attractive initially, but now she found it a potential hindrance in diplomatic meetings. He was a good man, but was not what she thought of when she pictured a Jedi. Rey, Rey was the ideal Rose thought of when she pictured a Jedi. Reserved, cool headed, and able to put the galaxy before all things. She had passion but she used it for good. Finn was earnest, but not… not a Jedi. At least not yet.

C3P0 meanwhile had made a sound she would have expected, “Ah. Count Gora, named after the famous father of Count Dooku, Jedi Knight.”

Gora laughed, “Truly a diplomat of a droid you are. I don’t know anyone else who would describe either of them even as glowingly as that.” It was at that comment that Finn shifted, still looking somewhat uncomfortable, but less worried than he had before. Rose made a mental note to follow up when they were not in Gora’s presence.

“It is a shame,” C3P0 said, “In all my years I have no memory of meeting either of them, though Count Dooku was quite the figure in his time.”

Count Gora watched the ships take off silently, and then turned sharply to the group. “I apologize,” he said calmly. His accent was hard to place, and he had a charming smile, despite his austere demeanor. He was everything a politician dreamed of being. “If I had known we would have company quite so soon, I would have commissioned my own fighter to be repaired at an express rate so your Falcon could take a rest. I mean no offense, but she is in need of some loving care herself.”

Rose smiled. It was not forced, not to him, but it had the feeling of a forced smile all the same. One that was expected. “There’s no need, your Excellency,” she said, “The Falcon may not look like much but she’s extraordinary once you get to know her. I’m much happier to hear that you’re the kind of leader who puts his people’s needs before his own.”

“Am I?” he said, turning and gesturing for her to follow, “I send my own people up there before myself. Does that make them not seem expendable?”

Rose smiled, a more genuine one, and gestured a half-shrug of disagreement. “You know as well as I, Count, that those in ships are not in the most danger. If they should fail, the whole planet will surely be ‘liberated’ and then what will happen?” she said, charmingly.

His half-smile told her all she needed to know. “So be it,” he said, “If you have not called the rest of your fledgling fleet, now would be the time to do it. Our forces united, and it would seem that the Imperial Remnant has amassed a great deal of their forces here. A fist to strike at the fledgling forces we’ve built.” There was something about the way the Count said it that made Rose’s hair stand on end. This was a coordinated strike. Which meant that the First Order had a leader.

The Count must have gathered that she’d made some connections in her head, and pursed his lips. “What is it?” he asked her.

Finn looked between the two of them, and Rose could only help but wonder if he was surprised at the rapport that she and the Count had developed, not dissimilar to himself and Poe. Then the same math seemed to happen in his head, his expression tightening. “The Imperial Remnant is coordinating,” he told the Count. The ruler did some thinking and then nodded.

“Come,” he said, and then gestured them to follow with a turn, his cape flourishing behind him, “I suppose it would be easiest in this time to do away with suspense, and let you know outright that we will be putting our forces in addition to your own. We have a fleet built to fight an Empire, though the idea to recommission it is recent. We never decommissioned, but time can be just as detrimental as beneficial in this capacity. We’ve found some of the ships to be… outdated, and we were in the process of retrofitting them for coming confrontation. We weren’t fully ready, but we’re in the process of doing what we can. I was hoping they would be ready within the month…” he gestured that it didn’t matter anymore.

“Anything you could do would be helpful,” Rose told him, walking quickly to catch up to the Count, “Our first step needs to be getting a signal off-world. The more people we can bring in the better we’ll be.”

The Count nodded, and called for one of his retinue who had not joined the Falcon in it’s combat flight. The soldier, at least that’s what Rose thought she was, was a woman with dark skin, and braids of white hair that were piled on her head almost akin to a bird’s nest. “Sir,” she said, falling into step with the other four members, who were moving at a pace that just barely managed to accommodate C3P0.

“We need to send a signal off-world, Captain Freece. Diplomat Rose here will be letting you know the frequency to send them on, and to where. But I want to be sure that everything is set up before we get there,” he told her. She nodded and then took off at a faster pace then the rest of the group. 

Finn looked briefly at Rose then announced, “I’ll go with her, I can compose the message and then you just tell us where.” Without waiting for Rose’s approval he took off after Captain Freece. Rose reflected that it seemed like he was always in motion, always looking for the next adventure that needed to be undertaken.

“I understand,” The Count said, interrupting her train of thought. She looked at him again, and found herself struck by the facial features of a man who was maybe only ten years her senior. He was craggy and if she didn’t know better, she would have thought him a man who was a mix of a brawler and a rough, not a diplomat, and certainly not from the line of Serrenno. “I understand that you are something of a Resistance hero yourself, Rose,” he finished.

“I… haven’t done all that much,” she feinted, “My biggest, first mission was the one that helped get us into the pickle that we’re in now. We were trying to stop their hyperspace tracker and instead we… it was a disaster.” Somehow Finn had bounced right back from that, Poe as well. She couldn’t help but wonder if she was just more naturally empathetic. Even a year later she couldn’t help but think about it at night. The way the ships had been blasted away by the First Order at the order of Hux. The man who had never quite made his way to Supreme Leader. The way that she felt responsible for so many of her allies becoming little more that motes of dust in space.

They continued through the hallway that was full of activity as pilots and Serrennians moved to and fro to get everything they needed battle-ready. Rose took it in as best she could, even with the pace that they were moving at towards what she assumed must be command. At another point in time it must surely have been a palace of some sort, but now had been transitioned into a wartime area. There were power cords strung up through hallways that towered twenty-thirty feet up, and the whole area was set up to be as open as possible. The hallways was almost more apt to be described as a bridge, and large windows looked out to other halls that were certainly the same way, and below she could see the people preparing the ships in the hangers.

“It is hardly time to give a tour,” Gora said, and Rose could hear a slight tinge of bitterness to his voice. Surely, he’d wanted them to arrive so he could present to them a factory working in full force to meet the demands that the Resistance was sure to have. She also wondered idly about the title of Resistance. They had decided to stick with it until there was an actual sense of government to it, but after how the last attempt to reinstate the Republic had gone, there had been many a conversation as to what that next form of government would look like. Rose was unsure what she actually was hoping for.

Count Gora interrupted her thoughts. “We are moving less quickly then I hoped,” he admitted, “Are you sure you cannot move faster, droid?”

“Oh dear,” C3P0 said, “I’m afraid I am doing my best, sir. I’m going the fastest I can.”

“He’s right,” Rose added, “Both of you are right actually. C3P0 meet us at the command center as soon as you can, we don’t need you for your translation services, and I think we can avoid a major political gaff considering how the Count here has agreed to give us some degree of aid, at least I’m sure until the Star Destroyers overhead are cleared.”

The Count nodded, his features so sharp that even the small action looked severe when he did it. “Indeed,” he added, “If you get lost, I’m sure someone here would be more than willing to help you find your way.”

They nodded to each other and then picked up their pace, leaving the droid behind them. Rose could hear him complaining as they left him, but didn’t find much alternative. Their conversation was light as they moved, with the Count pointing out features of the shipyard that might have gone without notice if he hadn’t alerted Rose to them. Even then, when she looked out over the work being done, the ships that were close enough to ready that last minute alterations would allow them to join even this fight, she found herself drawn to look at the people.

The Serrennians were darker skinned for the most part, with olive-like complexion and dark hair. There were hundreds of people working, from young men and women to elders who were stuck in seated movers. Everyone was pitching in. This was the kind of world she wanted to show as an example to those unsure of the work that could come from people coming together. This was exactly what they needed to see.

Alternatively, she turned her face skyward. The battle was going on up there, and at this distance all she could see was brief flashes of lights from different laser fire and explosions going off. She had made reference to the people on the ground being vulnerable if anyone got through, but she had thought of it in the abstract. Once again she was in danger. By coming here, she had helped to put everyone here in danger. They needed to save the people of the galaxy, but how many would die to do it? She also had to not think about the fact that all the stormtroopers, or at least any of the initial group, were like Finn. Brainwashed. Children. She wondered how hard it must be for Finn not to think about it. She wondered if that was the real reason Rey had left.

They had not been as close as she would like, and she suspected that Rey was so aloof because of her inherent “Jedi” qualities. Though now she wondered if that was true, seeing Finn be so very different. Now she wondered if Rey had any real connection to anyone here but the stormtrooper turned Resistance leader. Which meant she’d simply fought for the good of the galaxy. Once again, Rose’s admiration for the Jedi woman grew.

They arrived at the command center, and Rose found herself feeling right at home, though the surroundings were very different. There were consoles everywhere, with screens displaying all sorts of readouts, from which active pilots were communicating, to where different squads were. She saw a familiar screen read out that told her the Serrennians were already trying to hack the communications between the First Order ships.

The layout of the room itself was ideal for what she wanted too. The whole layout was that of a circle, with many concentric rings. The communications teams seemed to be broken out into their own squads in hemispherical coalitions. Those groups reported towards a central commander, and that commander was able to, at a moment, turn and speak to someone on a raised platform at the center of the room. On that platform there was a holomap displaying the whole battlefield at a glance, and beneath that, there were stations where the command team could call up specific information as needed.

She saw that Freece was looking at one of the Command monitors, with Finn leaning over and pointing at different things on the display. As Rose and Gora entered, she saw him look up, and his face turned towards an upset expression. He was easy to read, and so Rose mentally braced herself for bad news. “Communications are jammed, sir,” Captain Freece said with barely a glance up to confirm she was speaking to Rose and the Count, “We managed to get the short-ranged communications online” she gestured to the rest of the room, where groups were communicating with flight teams, “but anything off-world is being blocked.”

Rose bit the inside of her cheek. “You don’t happen to have a ship with powerful communications ready, do you?” Rose said.

Count Gora also looked worried, “I’m afraid not. So we can get someone to one of your capital ships -”

“We could take one of the Destroyers,” Finn interjected, “Use them to send out or signal.”

“Actually, we do have a ship that would work,” Captain Freece interjected. “It’s a bit of a clunker, because it’s engines aren’t… one-hundred percent ready. But it is able to get the communications out if we can get it up in atmosphere.”

“That’s too risky,” Gora said.

“If we bring a team up with it,” Freece interrupted again, “We could defend it until it gets the signal out.”

“I’ll go,” Rose said suddenly. “I know the codes, and if I put the message out, our people will know it’s me. Besides, I’m no good at military strategy.”

Finn looked up startled, “But Rose…”

“Finn, I’m going. Like it or not, you have to stay here, you’ve been working with Poe on the military side of things, and if you can communicate with him, we may have some degree of luck on our side,” she said.

“We can put a escape pod on board, and give you a pilot,” the Count said, and looked briefly at Captain Freece before shaking his head, “This is incredibly risky, Rose. I know we’ve only just allied, but if you don’t get this out there… I don’t know how long we can hold them off.”

“I know,” she said, “I saw the shipyards. We have people to protect.”

In an incredibly short period of time, Rose found herself getting on board a small junker ship, the communications array of which seemed to be the main purpose of the ship. Gora confirmed this for her as he saw her and the pilot, a young man named Vence, off. “This ship has next to no combat capabilities. You’re going to be completely dependent on the other ships up there. Do not be afraid, if you lose them, to take that escape pod out. We don’t want to lose anyone on a suicide mission. Good luck up there, both of you,” he told them. It was only as he said it that Rose realized that’s what this was, a suicide mission. She had no intention of using that escape pod before the message got sent out.

But she didn’t say anything. She just nodded, and got into the ship behind Vence. Another stranger set to join her in war, like Finn had been when they’d first met. Like she had been to Poe before the mission that had gone so awry. Strangers fighting a war that had been started by those who had come before. It all felt so wrong to her. But she set about her task, getting the message prepared to send off. She was on her own now. They all were, aside from Chewie and Poe. In fact, certainly now C3P0 was at the command center, or even more likely, trying to “rush” down here before Rose could take off.

“Ready pilot?” she asked.

“Strap into something,” Vence said agreeably. He wore his hair in a ponytail, long down his back, and on his face goggles. Presumably there was tech in those that would help him with his piloting. She found a chair and pulled the buckle over her, then swiveled appropriately to start composing the message for the people who needed to help.

There was the sounds of take-off, and Rose could hear Vence speaking to the other pilots, though she did her best to tune it all out. When there was a lull in the conversation, she turned, “Let me know when to send,” she said.

Vence nodded, and tapped a screen to his side. “When this is glowing I’ll know we’ve got a target we can send to. You already put the destinations in?”

“I did,” Rose confirmed, making a mental note of the panel. The craft shook around them, “What’s that?”

“They’re firing on us already,” he said, his face showing her this was unanticipated, “They must realize what we’re up to. We’ve got Warbeast Squadron with us though.” She didn’t know the squad, of course, but his tone was confident all the same. She nodded and went back to the message.

Coordinates, details of what was happening, codes to communicate with the ground team once they were in atmosphere were all crafted into a single data package. It had an encryption on it, and she had set multiple destinations, but even if it didn’t hit all of them, there was a confirmation ping that would let others know who it was meant to go to, and if they had failed to receive it for some reason.

There was another shake, and she heard Vence swear. She turned and saw him hurriedly adjusting different levers and dials on the dash. “What’s going on?” she asked. She’d been so absorbed she hadn’t even paid attention to how high up they were, but around the viewport she could see all manner of ships flying by, some ignoring them, and others trying to take potshots that Vence seemed to be able to avoid with relative ease.

“Beast One and Beast Four are down,” he said, and then swore again. There was a jolt and then a brief flash of light, and Rose heard a scream as she was shoved into the wall by the chair she sat in. This was what she’d been worried about. The team that had come with them was falling, and a brief check confirmed that she was alone here in the cockpit. She unbuckled and swore herself.

She moved into the secondary chair and switched control over to the console she was at. Little monitors flipped on, no doubt giving her the information she actually needed to pilot, but she didn’t know what they all meant and realized she was going to have to eyeball it. “Should be easy,” she whispered to herself, “Turn the thrust all the way up, and gun it.” It had turned into the suicide mission she had anticipated. Survival was unlikely now, so if she needed the shields to take a few hits, then that’s what needed to happen.

She turned the lever all the way up and clutched her necklace, her thoughts turning to Paige. She wondered if this is what it had felt like for her sister, had she suspected it was going to end when she went out on that bombing run? Had she suspected that she would be leaving behind her sister for good this time? She clutched the throttle as more attacks rocked the ship.

Then, the panel came on. “Shit!” she said, and turned to send the message out. A few clicks, the ship rocked again, and she had to steady herself before she could finalize the data transmission. Then there was a progress bar that started. Anticlimactically, it sped through its progress and then beeped success at her. The ship rocked again, and she saw in one of the screens that a whole wing had been severed.

“The escape pod,” she whispered, and started towards it. Then stopped. She looked at Vence, lifeless? Unconscious? Either way, she didn’t want to leave his body here. She picked up, and swore again at how heavy he was, all dead-weight. She dragged him with her to the escape pod, and got in.

She swallowed as the whole ship rocked again. Through the small port window she could that they had managed to make it up above the first layer of Star Destroyers. That must be why they could get the message out. She swallowed, and then hit the escape command. As all seemed clear, the planet getting larger in the screen, she felt herself jolt again. Her first worried thought was that they’d shot her out of the atmosphere. The next, bigger concern hit and she realized what was happening as the planet began to get smaller again. She had been caught by a tractor beam.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Almost left it on a cliffhanger that Rose had been blasted out of the sky, but knowing my update schedule (ie inconsistent and infrequent) that seemed too mean-spirited.


	8. Beneath Dagobah

# Rey 3

She was back on the Supremacy. But it was her ship now. She knew its corridors, its familiar stale yet sterile scent. The walls were polished to shine such that the oil must certainly have come from Hux’s hair. Her lips curled into a smile at that. Would Kylo laugh when she told him? Would he wait until she approved the joke to join her in mirth? When she had taken his hand all those months ago, she would not have guessed how he would let her dominate him. She would not have guessed that in giving in, the power she had would gain would be immeasurable. Yet here she was.

After what had happened, when Ben had cut down his master for her, her own decision had been hard, but she felt it was right now. She had bargained for the survival of the Resistance, and he had considered small mercy, but had left them prisoners until the conflict was over. Except for his mother. She had disappeared somehow, against all odds. But that was smaller matters compared to recovering the galaxy. The First Order as Snoke had imagined it had indeed been bad, a fascist in charge of the galaxy. But Ben had convinced her, over time, that for now they ruled so that eventually once order was restored to the galaxy, they could slacken their grip, and create a new ruling council.

She saw the way Hux looked at him when he said that. She had seen the cruel mix of jealousy and hatred in the Commander’s eyes. She had not done anything about it yet. Let him stew, he knew he was only in power until one of them decided otherwise. But still she heard the way that Ben talked about him. He hated Hux, truly despised him, but when she inquired, there was more there. She could not help but wonder if a young Hux had been just as damaged as Ben, in his own way. Of course, this did not discount what he’d done to the Hosnian System. But she could not help but wonder if the system would still be there if the ruling body of the First Order was in actuality, herself alongside Hux and Ben. If Snoke had never been involved.

“Sloane will be returning from the edge of the galaxy soon,” Kylo Ren was saying as she entered into the new Throne Chamber of the Supremacy. The new throne was made to just barely accommodate the two of them, while not being so big as to look awkward if only one was on the throne. She didn’t understand the technology behind it. In another life she had seen this throne, she had seen herself sitting on Ben’s lap here. Kneeling before the Supreme Leader were the Knights of Ren, and as she saw all of this, her brain seemed to frizz. On one hand, she felt like she’d just killed the Knights. On the other hand, she knew that Ben had killed them on Exogol. And yet here they were and not a hair out of place. She shook herself as her thoughts struggled.

Her co-leader continued, “When she returns the war will continue in earnest. I will be relying on you to take care of your own sectors. Peace is the goal. We must bring Order back to the galaxy.”

“And damn them if they stand against us,” Rey added, stepping forward from where she’d been lingering in the shadows. A deep part of her rebelled at what she’d said, but why should she care about a galaxy that had never done anything for her? The only good in it had come from Ben’s family, and from Finn. But Finn was captured, here aboard the Supremacy with her and Ben. He was belligerent, but not a fool and after each conversation she was more sure that he was closer to seeing the truth of the way things were. There was still time for it anyway.

“My lady,” Ben said softly. He stood and put out a hand to her, palm face up. She went to him, craving his contact. She had only seen him minutes before this, but it felt like so long ago for some reason, all the same. “Together, we will rule this galaxy.”

She spoke the truth then, the one that had been lying in her heart for longer than she had even remembered, the kernel that had sought to get free for months. “I don’t need the galaxy, Ben,” she said, “All I need is time with you. No Jedi, no Sith. No Empire or war. When this is all over, when peace is achieved, I want to see the stars.”

His breath hitched as she spoke. “Did you make the right decision?” There was no need to specify which one, though the fact that she could hear him only out loud, not in her head, was disconcerting in its own right.

Her hand took his, “I don’t know. I know you are the right choice, Ben Solo,” she said it low, like a whisper, though surely the knights knew his real name, “but The First Order is not. We need to figure out what is right, how do we move forward. But this, all of this,” she gestured as she said it. She stepped forward and put her hand on his cheek, where the scar she had marked him with sat still angry and red on his face, “This isn’t real. Much as part of me wants it to be. I didn’t make this choice, and I lost you as a result. I’m going to bring you back. I will. But this wasn’t what happened.”

He looked at her with watery eyes, and she didn’t even realize that her own voice was cracking. Surely this wasn’t really Ben, not her Ben, but it felt real all the same. “We will restore the galaxy together, but we’ll do it my way,” she said. Her thumb traced the scar lightly. “We will be together again. I know it.”

The scene around them faded to smoke, and she remembered suddenly where she was, deep in the depths of Dagobah. For a brief moment, even with all the scenery gone, she could still see him, still feel him in her hands. “I do miss you though. I didn’t realize how hard parts of this would be.” She wiped her face of the tears that finally were coming. She knew it wasn’t him, but all the same, for just a brief moment it felt alright to be weak.

Then he was gone, and she was back in the rough-hewn tunnel that led ever downward. And before her, she could see another ring of fog. The first had put her on the Jakku of her memory, had made her the warrior she didn’t want to be. The second had put her on the Supremacy, made her the dark witch of the Sith, the epitome of her dark desires. What would the third do? It had only been the dissonance from reality that had pulled her out before. Part of her wishes she had not left. Would the third temptation be even stronger?

She carried on.

Rey was a child again. Parents fighting. There were arguments she couldn’t understand at her age. There were fights and even as young as she was, she heard her name time and again. The memories picked up energy, and suddenly she saw her parents again. Her father, a weathered looking man, somewhere between fully broken and just beaten down. Her mother looked dry, on the verge of cracking. But immediately, they were not the people she had remembered when she had learned the truth of her heritage. Her own memories conflicted. The other two visions of the Force had been lies. So why would it show her her parents?

“The soldiers were back at the station again,” her father said, over a bowl of food, “Said something about giving sensitives over on behalf of the emperor.”

“Didn’t that old codger die?” her mother said, taking the bowl from him to have some herself.

He shrugged. “The Empire is youth. That’s what one of them said when I asked about it. Whatever the case, they’re not going to give anything over but gratitude. ‘When she comes of age, he’ll give her his name’,” he parroted.

“Gross,” her mother said, cutting a small portion out for her daughter. “And Plutt?”

“Enough money to get off this rock,” he said, “I say we take that.”

“They’ll be looking for her,” the woman said, “those soldiers.”

Her father said, “That’s not our problem if she’s not ours anymore, is it?”

The woman, her mother, laughed at that. Agreed with him. And Rey knew then, that the Force didn’t need to lie to her. What was worse for her to hear was the truth. She wasn’t the Emperor’s grandchild, not anymore than she was Plutt’s daughter. She had been nobody, and so he had come to claim her as his own. Ben and her were just as alike as they thought. Both given up by their family, though Ben’s had been a series of ultimately tragic happenings. With her parents, they had sold her. They had, in a way, protected her from becoming a pawn of the Emperor returned and the First Order, but that was incidental to their own reasons.

She wanted to hate her parents. She wanted to hate everyone involved. But instead she felt numb. A mixture of disappointment, and lack of surprise. She sat in this feeling. Detachment. This was what the Jedi had sought. It felt hollow to achieve it here and now. In this way. So quickly. She was a Jedi now more than she’d ever been. It felt like an empty victory.

Rey persisted. She made her way down under the fog once again. And there was no more for her to pass through. She felt a darkness leaving her. Her desire for revenge, for violence, for power was quenched. If this was what it meant to be a Jedi she was not sure she liked it.

At the base of the path there was a large circular room, and on the floor and walls she could see carvings and writing in ancient script. It was similar to the ancient Jedi texts she’d been translating with C3P0 and she felt certain that she could pull out certain words. One that stood out, one she’d been thinking of since Exogol, was the single word, Nexus. She found it on the wall, in relation to something that looked like a star chart. Her eyes began to trace over the room. There, next to the word again was iconography that she knew on instinct was the self same Sith Planet. She traced a line that shot out from it downward, it crossed paths with many other lines, but somehow didn’t intersect with any, instead it followed deeper and more consistent through the floor with only one. In the center of the star chart there was another planet, and the line from Exogol formed a deep ring around it. It had been given it’s own mosaic, similar to what she’d seen on Ahch-To. 

A black tile, with white insets like stars sat in this world. Although the line from it to Exogol was deep, other lines shot out from it, like a spiderweb, connecting it to all the different planets in some way. No, she corrected herself as she followed the trace of lines. On each of these other planets, the lines connected to a smaller circle inside. Somewhere on these planets were smaller nexus points. This was what she’d been reading about in the old Jedi texts. This must be the World Between Worlds.

She looked for any indication of what the different planets were. There were small icons on each of them that had some sort of indication as to what was there. Dagobah was a planet connected to one of the other planets, not a direct connection to the World Between Worlds, she could tell based on the tree icon that matched the very tree the temple rested under.

Another planet had a large wolf with ridges on it’s head, and another planet looked like a large lizard lounging in repose. But she didn’t know what those planets were from sight. She followed the trace from Dagobah, and found that it was connected to the planet with the wolves. There was a direct path there. She stood up and looked at where Exogol fell in relation to everything else. There was a path from here to that other planet, and if she used Exogol as a point of orientation, she could find it.

She did her best to memorize the space, though she felt BB-8 would have had far more success at such a trial. But all the same, she tried. As she was walking around the space, she stepped on the central tile again, on accident, and felt it give. She stopped and knelt down next to it. She tried again, pushing down on one part of it intentionally. It turned over, like a coin set in it, and she found the same figure that had been on the mosaic in Ahch-to, but this time, behind him there were two other figures: a younger looking man who was made of light and sat in darkness, and a young woman who looked made of shadow and sat in the light.

She traced the young man’s face. “Ben,” she whispered, caught up in how much it looked like the man she loved. The woman’s features were too hard to make out, though she could only assume… no, she realized. She didn’t want to give herself that false hope. It was better not to think about it. She wondered what it could mean. With all the visions of the future Jedi have, perhaps there was a chance that someone had seen a vision of this Dyad. Or perhaps there was more to the idea of the Dyad then even they had realized. She wondered how Ben had felt before she had been born. Had he felt as she did now? Like half of her was missing, even if he was not gone entirely. Had he felt her, even before she was fully formed?

She traced her fingers over the icon of the Ben look-alike. She thought once more of the thoughts that he’d sent her way in their final - no, first true - moments together. “Is that where you are?” she whispered, “The other side of that coin?” She could tell, based on the symbols on the ground, that it wasn’t just a planet. Exogol had been a true planet, alongside being a nexus. But this didn’t look the same way. She wondered, as she often did now, that she might be in over her head. Not that anyone else would be doing any better, as she was fond of correcting herself. Ben might have more understanding than she did, but that was only cause he had spent more of his youth researching Jedi history.

Rey looked at the far wall, and saw there was another fog wall waiting for her. But at this point, she had everything she needed… didn’t she? Was it falling to the Dark Side to search more? She reached out with her senses and didn’t feel the Dark Side down here, in that fog, the way she’d felt with the others. She straightened up, and rolled her shoulders. Nothing could be worse than learning that Palpatine had manipulated her in the same way he’d done to Ben all these years. She felt like she should have seen through his deception, and it made her feel even more sympathetic to what Ben had gone through.

She let out a deep breath and stepped into the fog.

And then stepped back out the other side. It felt odd as she walked through, like she was water moving through a sieve. She felt… lighter. And not in the sense of weight or energy or anything like that. But she felt like she’d been cleansed. It felt on one hand quite good, but at the same time it felt unnatural. The path on the other side of the fog was a slope upwards, and on the walls she could see temple markings. Truly here she was in an ancient Jedi Temple. She looked up and stared at the patterns. There were images of different ancient Jedi, ancient lightsaber designs. It was bizarre to see them all laid out on walls rather than on book pages.

There she saw a crosshilt design, and wondered when Ben had first seen it. There she saw a dual-blade saber, not dissimilar from her own. Crystal hieroglyphs poked through the wall and she wondered if it was genuine kyber. None of it called out to her though, so at least it wouldn’t matter to her. Then, she looked ahead and saw a central room with a dais in the middle. The dais looked similar to an anvil, and the room itself looked like it was made for smelting. Was there once a change to the Jedi such that they’d forged their blades in their entirety here? She knew kyber could grow, she knew the smelting could be done here. “I’ll have to show Finn,” she commented, as she went to one side of the room. They’d have to bring the metal to melt down on their own, as there was none in the temple, but otherwise, Finn’s blade could be wholly original.

Then Rey wondered when she would see him again. She’d run off so fast in her anger at his Poe that she hadn’t even contemplated whether she’d see him again. They would be carrying on the war without her, for certain. And Finn, a man more family then the one that had sold her, could be gone. She shook her head, “I’m spending too much time in my own head,” she said aloud, “I need to go find BB-8 and get off this planet.”

She continued deeper into the temple, upwards and outwards, and began to hope there was another way out then climbing all the way back up the tunnel with the layers of fog.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Chapter will be the first split chapter: Poe / Finn


	9. Legacy of Serenno

#Finn / Poe

While Rose was busy, her escape pod in the clutches of the Imperial Remnant, Poe and Chewbacca found themselves maneuvering the Falcon like it was young again. “I would have liked to meet Han,” he said, trying to make chit-chat while the ship dived through combat, “The ideas I have for the Falcon… I’m sure he’d approve if I had time to explain.” In the distance, The Colossus, the ship they were trying to save in all this made its way into the lower atmosphere of the planet.

The Wookie grumbled something in reply. “I know, I know he’s - he was - difficult, but I feel like I could wear him down.” Chewie replied again. Other ships began to fly up from the planet and from the carrier in sync, radios coordinating with one another.

“I wish I’d met Ben too,” he said, “More casually than… what it was. Before everything that happened. Timing never worked out. He was a Jedi to be, well read, potential to be a diplomat, and the New Republic already had me doing undercover work with different spice runners. In time we could have been like his parents in their prime.” The Falcon weaved it’s way through the fighting; Poe and Chewie dipping and diving to set up their Serrennian passengers for easy shooting.

Chewie gave him a look and then grumbled something else, a much longer reply. “I know,” he said, “But can you blame me? He was an awkwardly duckling, but he turned out quite handsome. I hadn’t met Finn yet, and that was before I realized it was… better not to start a relationship in a… workplace setting.” The Wookie’s reply was not as generous to Poe.

“Whatever,” Poe said under his breath, “You should focus on the fight anyway.” The Wookie threw the Falcon into a barrel roll and there was a cry from somewhere else in the ship.

“That’s just petty, you old fuzzball,” Poe said. The Wookie barked laughter at that. They began a strafing run on one of the Destroyers and suddenly there was a hailing from down below. “Falcon speaking,” he said.

Finn’s voice came through, clearer than what they’d been hearing all battle thus far, “Rose just went up there, but her ship was blown out of the sky! Do you see her escape pod? You were the closest ship!”

Poe and Chewie exchanged a look of concern. “Rose was up here? What? What was she doing?”

“Trying to get a message out to our allies, help us make a stand here!” Finn cried, “Tell me you see her! Did someone else pick her pod up?” He looked up from where he was at the central command console, and watched as Gora called up a map of the battlefield, then zooming in on the last known location of her signal.

“We don’t see anything,” Poe reported in, his voice clear and dejected even through the distance between them and the Falcon. Captain Freece gave Finn a look with some meaning and he realized he was nearly on the point of tears. Rose was important to him and now… could she be just gone?

“WAIT!” Poe cried out again, “We see… oh no. She’s caught up in some sorta, a tractor beam?” He was half in the co-pilot chair, half standing, leaning almost fully out over console. He could see an escape pod, Serrennian in design, moving slowly yet assuredly up into one of the Star Destroyers. Chewie was saying something that Poe could only assume was a Wookie swear, and Poe ran hundreds of scenarios in his head about what they could do to save her, but short of getting caught along with her, he couldn’t think of anything.

“What can we do?” Finn asked both over the communications and to the room at large. Gora swore where he was, his hand on his chin speculatively. Captain Freece threw her hands up in disgust and stalked out of the room.

“We’ll have to wait to mount a rescue,” Poe’s voice came through, “I don’t… no one’s ever taken a Star Destroyer without…”

His voice trailed off, but Finn finished it in his head, without a Jedi. He shook his head. The battle was fairly evenly matched, but there had to be something, something they could do. As though on cue, the tide turned. Other ships began to jump into the system, quickly identifying as Resistance call-signs and ships. As they swooped in, Finn watched as the First Order ships began to take heavy losses, and he heard Poe over the comm again, “They’re looking to make a jump!”

Finn turned and looked at Gora, who had not yet abandoned his station. “Is there anything we can do to stop them?” he asked. The desperation was palpable in his voice. While Rey had been his first friend outside of the First Order (he couldn’t think of Poe as a friend when he was so much more), Rose had been the first person to truly anchor him into the Resistance. Now they were here instead, him leading the Resistance from the ground against the Imperial Remnant, and Rose captured. Gora, however, shook his head.

“Ships took priority. We don’t have any sort of gravity wells that could force them to dead-in-the-water status.” The statement hit Finn like a ton of bricks.

“Damnit,” Finn swore and tossed his headset down, walking away and scowling. He then thought better to not let himself be out of the action, and without thinking used the force to pull the headset back to him, drawing on the very minor bits that Rey had been able to show him between missions. He did not see the light in Gora’s eyes, or that the rest of the command center reacted to, but instead focused solely on Poe, stretching out his feelings to see if he could feel what Poe was feeling, be there with him, support him.

“If we’re going to do something, we have to do it now,” Poe said from the co-pilot seat. He didn’t hear anything for a long moment and then the first of the Imperial ships jumped away. But a tension eased from him as he felt Finn on the other end of the line.

“I suggest we pull back, Commander Dameron,” Gora’s voice came over the comm, “I’ll order my people to come back in, and if you want to bring yours in, we’ll be able to create a defense for planetary siege. At the very least, once they jump, even if it’s still in the system we can work on some counter-jammers.”

Chewie’s growl of agreement was obvious in intention. Pull back, live to fight another day. It felt like Crait all over again, forced into retreat. But at least now there was more numbers on their side. More than that, he was in charge of the Resistance, and as much as he wanted to take the Falcon and follow the Star Destroyers, he couldn’t do that. Once again he felt the chains of commanding around him. “Chewie send out a signal to other Resistance ships to pull back to the planet. We’ll regroup there and figure out our next steps.”

When they landed this time not on the guest landing pad, but actually in the main military hanger bay, the other men who’d been manning the Falcon got off first, leaving Chewie and Poe an opportunity to go back through the ship themselves. “Any repairs you have to do, start making them now,” Poe told him, “check for…” he made a sign to indicate bugs. He didn’t expect anything from allies, but also didn’t want to leave themselves open to a potential betrayal. Better safe than sorry. “We may need you to take her back up there before too long.” Chewie growled an affirmative, and Poe smiled, patting his arm before heading off the ship himself.

There, Poe was waiting impatiently, and two met in a hug, neither able to say aloud how much they had felt alone without the other actually at their side. Poe steeled himself in preparation to not let his emotion show, and pulled back. “Rose,” he said, trying not to let his desperation edge into his tone, “We need to figure out a way to save her.”

Finn looked at him, and there was a twinkle in the young force-users eyes. “We have something that can help with that, apparently. But Gora wanted you to be here before we planned anything,” he said, “We were in the command center together, but he ran off saying he had to grab something.”

Poe gave him a nod, and the younger man led the way deeper into the military complex. The other soldiers were whispering, looking at Finn with some attention, and he did his best not to pay them any particular mind. It was something that had started since he had left the command center to come collect Poe, and he idly wondered if it was a side-effect of him taking a position of command, at least until he overheard some of the soldiers whispering to each other.

“Jedi.”

The word felt disconnected from him. For so long he had only thought of Rey as a Jedi, with himself as “just a man”. Even when he’d felt the pull of the force, for so long it had only been in relation to her, only been about the Force Nexus that she seemed to create around herself. He had not even thought of his earlier actions with the force, and how crowded the room had been. Of course people were talking.

Poe saw the shadow cross Finn’s face as he finally caught the word whispered among their allies. Tension rose in the former stormtrooper, and Poe reached out, grabbing Finn’s hand briefly and stopping their walk to comfort him. Finn turned, nervous. “Don’t worry,” Poe said, “there’s no pressure.”

“There’s always pressure,” Finn argued, shaking his head, though not letting go of the hand offered in support, “I’m not the Jedi that Rey is, I’m not the hero Luke was. I know even less about the Force than most people out there because I spent all my childhood in the ships of the First Order. But now, I can feel it. I didn’t know what Rey meant at first, but now I do. It’s like a… like a faucet. Before, it was like energy leaking into me, but now… now it’s like someone turned it on and I don’t know how to turn it off.”

“That’s okay,” Poe said, “I need you for you, Force or no Force. I’m not asking you to be a Jedi.”

Finn hesitated, and looked down to where their hands were still joined. “What are you asking me to be?”

Poe hesitated and bit his lip. “I…” he met Finn’s gaze and thought again of what he’d learned about mixing emotions and work. But when work dominated so much of life… before he could say anymore the thought was interrupted by Freece.

“There you two are,” she called out, “Count Gora is expecting you in the Leadership Room. Your agents from that Colossus ship, and from the fleet are meeting with ours in the Command Center.”

“And these are different rooms?” Finn asked, his brow furrowing. Captain Freece nodded, and Poe shook his head, a grin starting to form on his face.

“You all have been preparing for war for quite some time, haven’t you?” he asked.

“It pays to be prepared,” she said, gesturing for them to follow, “Even if we never got to use all our skill against the Empire, that didn’t mean we needed to scale back our capabilities.”

“The Imperial Remnant,” Poe said, “is the same enemy with a different label. Until they’re gone, the Empire is still around.”

She contemplated, then nodded with her head tilt toward the side. “Be that as it may,” she said, “they are not quite the Empire. No longer the same beast.”

Rather than following the path to the Command Center proper, Finn noted that the path she took them on wound downward, and spiraled around, effectively leading them into a room roughly below the Command Center. As it opened up into the room that Freece was clearly leading them too, Finn noted that it was like a dark reflection of the room up above, though dark from disuse more than anything.

Inside, at the center console, Count Gora was waiting for them. He was still dressed in full finery and Finn saw that he was waiting with bated breath. “We need to save our diplomat,” he said calmly, “And to do that, we need to get onto an Imperial Remnant ship. This is not something easily done, and if we did not have the two of you, I would not say it could be done. However, since we do have the two of you… it is only through combined efforts that we may be able to save your friend.”

He paused, and then stepped down to meet them closer to the entrance of the room. “I saw what you did earlier, Master Finn. I know you did not introduce yourself as a Jedi, and do not have the weapon of one on you. But we will need skills from that… from their teachings to properly assault their ship.”

“I’m not a Jedi,” Finn said, hesitantly, looking briefly at Poe, “But I will do everything I can to help find Rose.”

The last Count of Serenno paused, “This is good. Because what I offer was not a tool of a Jedi.” With that, he held out a metallic object to Finn. He took it gingerly, examining it even as he accepted it from the nobleman. It was a lightsaber, he could tell that much, with a curved hilt. He examined it briefly, and then ignited it. The air ionized around them, and a red blade shot from the handle. It felt… wrong, something in the Force cried out as he did it. But Finn held it steady.

“A token of alliance,” Count Gora told him, “An artifact from the Republic.”

“A weapon of war,” Poe added, “too valuable for us to be anything but grateful.”

Finn held it for a moment, knowing he should say something. Instead, he turned the blade off, and hooked it to his belt. “Let’s start planning,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the incredibly long delay! I wish the state of the world was my excuse for the hiatus, but writer's block struck before everything else. Hopefully this adds some light to your day if you read, and it feels all to appropriate to have a Finn focused chapter now.


	10. The Ruins of Malachor

Ben 3

“Feel, don’t think,” Ahsoka said for what must have been the fiftieth time.

“I know how to use the Force,” Ben said through gritted teeth, “The problem isn’t the way I’m trying to use it.” His hand splayed in front of him, he tried once again to wrest the pieces of the ship they were building out of the ground. It refused to budge, and he felt his connection to the Force waver. The piece he was most focused on shuddered in it’s spot, and began to move slightly, vibrating, as though it were trying to work its way out of the planet of Malachor, but failing to do make any real progress.

He cut his effort off and let it, and himself, rest. “I’m just weaker right now.” He intoned, and stepped away from the wreckage they were working on. They had come up with a broad idea of how to put the pieces together in such a way that it could become usable, but it was not the most solid of plans. Worse yet, it was all old tech, so even if they managed to get it into a proper set of positions, there was no guarantee that they would be able to make it work or find the fuel to use it properly. But they had to get away from here. The “portal” as Ahsoka put it, to the World Between Worlds, would not open again here. They’d both tried to coax it open several times, and even made a few attempts, fumbling and awkward though they were, to get it open together. Eventually, Ahsoka had declared they needed to search elsewhere. The portals couldn’t be open by the Dark Side without the Witchcraft of Dathomir, and even then, opening it with the Dark Side was a non-starter.

Which left them trying to get a crash site up and running again as an actual ship. It made him jealous of the Falcon’s tendency to get hit constantly and still go on as though it were indestructible. He wondered, where-ever it was - hopefully with Rey - that someone was taking care of it. Perhaps, he thought warmly, she and Chewbacca were keeping it alive the way Chewie and his father once had.

Ben walked back towards the makeshift camp they’d set up. “The problem is not that you’re weaker,” the Togruta woman said. Although she was roughly the same age as he was, she seemed far older than that. Her eyes had bags under them, and she seemed tense in a way that he could not describe easily… as though she had been prey for far too long, and now she was trying to find herself again. “Your connection to the Force, by your own admission, has changed significantly in a short amount of time. You are not the Force-user you were not long ago, and you have not yet worked your mind around that.”

“I did so well during our fight with Palpatine though,” he said bitterly, “I… haven’t been able to do anything like that since then.”

Ahsoka looked at him thoughtfully, and he got the sense that she thought she knew what was going on with him, even if she would not say it. “What?” he snapped.

“You were working on instinct in your fight. The Force was using you as much as you were using it. Now that the fight is over, there’s not the same pressing need. If the Force needed us to get off this planet right now, it would contrive a way for us to get off this planet. It doesn’t need that, so it has not.” She gave him a soft smile. He noticed she sat down and crossed her legs in the pose of meditation. It did nothing to settle his nerves.

“I’m glad you’re finding serenity in this, but I need to get back, one way or another,” he said. He still had not sat down, and was now looking back at the crash site. It was broken pieces of a ship right? He was not exactly an engineer but he knew ships better than most. Certainly he could put this back together.

“You would use the Dark Side of the Force?” she asked. Again, she gave off the impression she could read his thoughts. It was not an impression he liked.

Ben shook his head, “No. But I have to do something.” He pursed his lips in frustration and looked at the wreckage as though this new approach would offer him new ideas.

None came.

“Meditate,” she suggested. When he looked at her he cocked an eyebrow quizzically. For not the first time since they’d met, she blushed just a hint of color. “It was what the Jedi on Coruscant would do. Meditate and grow their connection with the Force.”

“I don’t know that it would be enough,” he said quietly, “And besides, it didn’t exactly get them far.”

“It would have been better if they had thought more and acted less,” Ahsoka said, and for the first time he could detect bitterness in her otherwise placid tone. They’d been here for… he realized he had no idea. Yet all the same, throughout the experience Ahsoka had acted with a calm that she could not seem to shake. “They rushed into war. They turned us… they turned themselves into agents of the Republic. Warriors. And when the Jedi Order fell to darkness… it only makes sense that the highest of us should fall the furthest.”

He knew he could stoke her anger if he prodded. Like the crawling of a snake he felt the pressure inside his head from his old masters, telling him that turning her to the Dark would change things. It would make the world different, free of the future that had left him stranded here. He swallowed, and heard his father’s voice instead, telling him that people put too much faith in things they thought were bigger than them. That when it came down to it, a single person can make a difference. He took a deep breath and let go of a tension he didn’t know he’d been holding onto. “You mean Anakin,” he said, “Don’t you?”

She looked up and he could see she was startled. “The first time you asked about him, you called him Vader,” she said.

“Vader was a sith,” he said, and shrugged, as though the name change had been intentional. “Look, I didn’t know him that well, I’ll be honest. And that’s not to say anything about the future, but he clearly… had a life before I was around. But I know this, my mother, she thought his blood was a curse. My Uncle Luke, he… thought there was good in Anakin, regardless of what had happened. But my father. Before he met Luke, he wasn’t even sure he believed in the Force. He was a man of action for so much of my life. It was only, only at the end that he stopped and truly took a moment to breathe.”

“I’m… not sure I understand,” Ahsoka said. He wasn’t sure himself where he was going with this. It was the most he’d talked with anyone out loud in a long while. Even with Rey, he had found so much hadn’t needed to be said, but Ahsoka was not in a similar category. He realized now he would never fully understand which, if either of them, was supposed to be a mentor to the other.

Ben sighed again, and scratched the back of his head, like he’d seen his father do a thousand times, and that’s when he understood. “Passivity… inaction… can speak just as loudly as action. Yes. The Jedi Order could have sat back and waited for a clear sign as to what they should do with the upcoming war between Republic and Confederation. But then what? The CIS win the war because the Republic has no one standing up for them? The galaxy falls into anarchy as the sith play the different worlds against each other, and then a new military might rises to bring Peace and Order to a fractured galaxy. The Jedi are branded as failures because they never take action.”

He paused and thought carefully again.

“You guys lost before the war even began. Anakin may have been the highest of you, he may have been a great Jedi, but that didn’t make him incapable of failure. Your Order was failing. Maybe. Maybe without Sidious the Order could have righted itself. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, and we’ll never know. Like you say, these portals or whatever they are, they don’t change things, just let them happen the way they’re supposed to. But Sidious failed in the end too. He wanted to erase the Jedi from existence. You are proof enough that he never stood a chance.” He finished with a cough, and then looked around lamely, not ready to see her reaction, blushing or unaffected, either way was bad to him right now.

Then he looked at the ship again, and jumped. “I’m not saying we use the Dark Side, but this temple. It has technology, doesn’t it? We could use that!” Without further elaboration he darted forward across the plain of the great fight that had occurred on Malachor and towards the Dark Side temple. He almost didn’t realize that Ahsoka had followed him until he came to the door, and she shook her head, and laughed.

“You need to open it in tandem. Its the way they set their doors up,” she said.

“Wait, really?” he said, looking at it confused.

Ahsoka nodded, “My first thought was that the Rule of Two was the reason for it, that there was a test between Master and Apprentice, and if either lacked faith in the other, it would prevent them from working together. But the Rule of Two ultimately feasts on that mistrust, which wouldn’t work with this setup because it would limit the Sith who could, or would, enter this temple.” She stepped forward, and he followed her motions as they put their efforts together and lifted the stone door that would bring them inside. The sound of the rock sliding against other smooth rock left him eager to get in and start exploring.

“But then I thought about it more, and what the Sith actually believed in. They,” she looked at him and seemed to be evaluating whether or not he’d philosophically learned any Sith teachings. When he shrugged, she went on, “They believed in emotions guiding them. Its always struck me as odd though, that the Dark Side is so bent around forcing the Force to act in your interest as opposed to working with it to achieve a positive outcome. It didn’t fully align with my understanding of the Sith. I’m wondering now, if the Sith, that is the original Sith who created this temple didn’t use the Dark Side. Not at first. But they let their emotions guide them, they chose partners who they cared about, believed in, felt… passion for. This would be more a test to make sure you were strong enough to care for each other, rather than a test to determine if you were in imminent danger.”

“Perhaps I should take Rey here when I get back then,” he muttered, squinting at the walls in the cavern.

Ahsoka laughed and then seemed to hesitate before handing him her smaller white blade. He had still not even attempted to turn his on, though she had examined it and told him it would work if he needed it. He’d left it back at the crash site. “Thanks,” he said, and turned it on to illuminate his surroundings. She did the same.

“You think there’s technology in here?” she asked.

“There must be,” he said, “Come on.” As they explored the temple, he coaxed out of her the story of Anakin, at least as best as she could relay. He heard more about his grandmother, Padme, than he had ever expected to know. His mother had done some studying about the Queen of Naboo, but it paled in comparison to someone who had actually known her. He was also beginning to see that he had been pre-destined to have fire in his blood, for even she had been a person of action and flurry. Ahsoka also recounted some of her “war stories” about his grandfather. He got the impression listening to Ahsoka that he was speaking to a relative in some way. That she had been Anakin’s sister, not just his apprentice. They had found a section far below the surface, a triangular corridor where two walls met at a point, and where there were undamaged pieces of metal, and wires that he knew he could repurpose with gold old fashioned engineering when he mentioned it, causing her to hesitate.

“I think so,” she said, “You know, when I was just out of the Jedi Order, I would refer to him as my brother because… well, there was a shame that came with having left the Jedi, like I had been betrayed by them, you know? But, until he fell, I had never been betrayed by him, never left behind. It was only sometime after Mandalore that I even had reason to suspect he was dead. There was a part of me that had hoped he was like me. That he was too clever or too good to get caught or betrayed. I almost wish I’d been wrong now.”

He let her process in silence, and continued to work on the wire that they’d found when he felt a pounding in his head. It came slowly, so much so that he had not even realized it had been going on for some time when he felt the stabbing in his head. It was like a hot blade pushing into his brain, and he doubled over in pain where he was kneeling, screaming without words, and perhaps without sound. But Ahsoka jumped right away, and he could see her mouthing his name. He couldn’t hear anything but a sudden ringing sound, and his vision grew dark at the edges.

When he opened his eyes again, there was darkness at the end of the corridor. Ahsoka was gone. The corridor was flooded with the dark red light that the stone cast under the illumination of his lightsaber dirk. There was a heavy mechanical breathing coming from somewhere in the darkness. “She left you,” a voice spoke. It was hollow, mechanical. It reminded him of the synthesizer in his old mask. Then it dawned on him.

He shot up, and though the headache had abated, it had not left. He found he had to lean up against the wall with his left hand to steady himself. “What?” A thousand questions sprung to mind. How? What had he done to her? Was this how Ahsoka had died, and he hadn’t known. Alone under Malachor by a monster who had come back to finish the job when he caught wind that the fight had not ended with the victory he’d assumed? Was this where he died too? A world in the past, where thousands who had been torn between light and dark had met the same fate.

“I am not one for games, boy,” a red lightsaber sparked in front of the dark form that stepped towards Ben. Darth Vader, for the mask could not belong to anyone else at this point in history. “You are a conspirator of a rebel, a Jedi no less.” The footsteps towards Ben echoed down the hall, and he began to realize just how doomed he was. He had a dirk, a weapon too small for the woman who used it, someone even slighter in frame and build than himself. He could not use the Force better than the man Anakin had become.

He took a deep breath, and his thoughts paused. He took another and let his mind still. “I won’t fight you,” he said.

“A foolish choice,” the monster said.

“A dream,” he said, “A foolish choice is a dream that doesn’t work out. And I’d rather try.” What was it Luke had always said? Do or do not, there is no try. But there was. There was trying, because otherwise you could become paralyzed by indecision. With that, he turned the dirk off and threw it to the ground. Or tried to. It caught in the air as Vader raised a fist and swept his intention out with The Force.

The dirk turned back on, but Ben held his ground. “Are you afraid?” Vader asked, the dirk rising to Ben’s head, staying just inches from where it could strike him down. If he was going to take action to stop it, he had to take action now.

“Yes,” Ben said, “But only those who know fear can overcome it.” He closed his eyes waiting to feel the strike from the Dark Lord of the Sith.

Instead the poke he got in the head was far less lethal. Ahsoka’s finger jabbed him on the temple, right where he’d felt the source of the excruciating pain. “Ben?” she said, watching as his eyes refocused. Another dream? A vision? “Are you okay? I thought I lost you there for a moment.” He shook himself out of whatever had overcome him and recounted his brief experience.

“The temple,” she said, “It still has darkness in it. It must be trying to draw it from us. Sounds like… whatever you did put it aside, for now. But it’ll continue to fester, the longer we’re in here. Let’s try and get what we need and get out of here.” He nodded agreement and quickly finished up the work that seemed to be what they needed to get from here. At the very least to leave this location and find somewhere else with a portal to the World Between Worlds. When he thought they had enough, he bolted upright, got Ahsoka half to carry, and followed her back out the way they came.

Neither noticed the shade that seemed to linger in the corridor that had sat like a shadow since his waking. Neither saw as it oozed down the corridors after them, moving like a half-formed thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the long hiatus between chapters! Writer's block, real life, and honestly even Star Wars got in the way. I have reached a point where everything of canon going forward will have to be flexible to what's true in this story, though it does mostly take place in unexplored times (for now). I hope people enjoy! I have not forgotten the story, and am happy that I'm coming back to it, even if I'm not the best at this kind of story.


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